25 ms·

AWS forked my project and launched it as its own service

• thrownaway954 6y ago
  i don't see what the issue is. his project is licensed under apache2: https://tldrlegal.com/license/apache-license-2.0-(apache-2.0) https://tldrlegal.com/license/apache-license-2.0-(apache-2.0... i mean, as long as they include the license, they don't have to give any credit whatsoever. remember this, companies do things according to their legal department and i'm almost certain that their legal department said flat out that if they credit the author they could set themselves up for a lawsuit down the line. so they followed the license requirements to the book. if the author is pissed about a big company using his project and them not giving him a props, he should have used a license that requires an attribution of the original author.
• frabert 6y ago
  If you don't like the terms of the license for software you released maybe you should have chosen a different one.
  • nicoburns 6y ago
    There's surely a space between "perfectly acceptable" and "illegal"? I don't like this idea that you have no right to complain about something if you haven't specifically banned it in a legally enforceable license.
    • frabert 6y ago
      For big companies, there's no distinction between "morally acceptable" and "legal". Stick to a license where what's immoral to you is made illegal.
      • lki876 6y ago
        For people there is and its always people who make decisions. Companies are just a legal entity.
        • zelphirkalt 6y ago
          But then it depends on what kind of people with what kind of mindset make such decisions, doesn't it? (Hint: It's not the altruistic "share with everyone" mindset they have.)
      • nicoburns 6y ago
        I don't think that's entirely true. Large companies respond to public pressure over things all the time. Some of the better run ones also take the initiative to do things ethically off the bat. If a large company is treating "legal" as "morally acceptable" then we should be calling them out on this, not accepting as part of being a large company. We should certainly also update legislation to force them to do things ethically, but it's not always possible to cover every possible case and thus our society depends on at least some level of corporate ethics.
        • boomlinde 6y ago
          > I don't think that's entirely true. Large companies respond to public pressure over things all the time. That type of response to pressure isn't necessarily of a moral nature. If your customers are boycotting you for not including skub in your product, your choice to include skub in the future could simply be an effort to maintain your customer base, regardless of what moral values skub (non-)inclusion represents.
      • kllrnohj 6y ago
        If that were true then big companies wouldn't have PR departments. But they do, because public image does actually matter to them. Brand recognition & emotional response to those brands is a huge part of being a big company.
    • ivanbakel 6y ago
      In this case, the author can set out what they think is acceptable in their license terms. Attribution costs nothing to the user - so if you want it, stick it in your license. People should be able to comfortably use software within the bounds of the license without worrying about the author coming along and then shaming them for not complying with an additional set of implicit constraints. Yes, it would have been nice for Amazon to acknowledge the original author. But given that they are not obligated to, it's unfair to act as if they are at fault for not doing so.
      • threatofrain 6y ago
        A credit-to-author clause has been tried before by the tech community, and IMO it's up to the community and not an individual author to develop a license which fits. The reason is because any modification to a well-known agreement makes your license very expensive to understand, even if it's a trivial modification. Open source licenses only work because the community adopts them as a standard.
        • another-dave 6y ago
          I'd agree with this — with things like Creative Commons it's very clear if someone is asking for attribution or not, if it allows non commercial etc. In an enterprise company, it's _much_ easier to use something with an established licence. Having "MIT with attribution" might be waved through by a standing policy. Having "my custom MIT fork" needs Legal involved & may not be a hill to die on so just get ditched instead.
      • mywacaday 6y ago
        I think it comes back to politeness, somewhere in amazon there is product manager that saw or was shown Tim's repo and saw an opportunity(nothing wrong with that). It would have been a nice thing to do to give him a shoutout just like it was a nice thing to do of Tim's to release his code under a permissive license. There must be a mountain of code forked by large companies that if given some sort of recognition would be of benefit to the original author even if its only internet points.
    • barkingcat 6y ago
      That's the way corporations have acted forever. If attribution is needed, put it in the license.
      • acomjean 6y ago
        They’ll do it too. If I look through the menus of my oldish (not smart) Panasonic flatscreen tv, there is a menu option that displays all the licenses of the open source software used.
    • Cthulhu_ 6y ago
      Oh you have the right to complain, just no legal recourse or entitlement to anything.
    • boomlinde 6y ago
      > There's surely a space between "perfectly acceptable" and "illegal"? If there is, it's a space that you can minimize using licensing terms, and as a user I will assume that the licensing terms are chosen by the authors in a fashion that best represents their interests. Especially since so many template licenses exist that address this exact problem. > I don't like this idea that you have no right to complain about something if you haven't specifically banned it in a legally enforceable license. I think it's unfair to imply that the post you respond to represents that idea, if that's what you're doing. Although worded frankly, it's a constructive suggestion for what proprietors can do to prevent this. It's not a new problem.
    • clinta 6y ago
      I would prefer to see these things enforced by culture and norms rather than laws and licenses. I don't want to have to parse legalese as part of my role as an engineer. I don't want companies to have to hire more lawyers to verify they can use software I wrote. I want them to be able to just use it, then contribute back after they've experienced using it. I don't want a restrictive license may prevent them from ever even trying my software in the first place. I want culture and norms that encourage the company to contribute to the project, not laws.
  • tnolet 6y ago
    OP here. You are 100% right. But it's more about the spirit than the letter here. My company heavily depends on OS from some great projects: we make money based on other people's hard work too. Just a short "shout out" would have been nice. We do that with many open source projects, or we sponsor them. And we are a tiny tiny company.
    • senko 6y ago
      I agree with you, but Amazon hasn't reached $1.6T market cap by being "nice". (edit: corrected amount, thx jimhi).
      • warrenq 6y ago
        You missed a T there.
      • jimhi 6y ago
        1.6 TRILLION
        • cute_boi 6y ago
          in USD too.
    • searchableguy 6y ago
      Next time, slap AGPL. Maybe offer an alternative license to companies for GitHub sponsorship alongside. I really hate this happens to people. :(
  • tinus_hn 6y ago
    Common courtesy is made of unwritten rules and it does serve a purpose.
    • pornel 6y ago
      For person-to-person interactions or small communities. Unwritten rules don't work for corporations. They're driven by what's profitable and (not even always) what's legal.
  • tuna-piano 6y ago
    If Jeff Bezos has a $50 meal at a restaurant and tips $0, would you blame the restaurant for not having a mandatory tipping policy? Or would you blame Jeff Bezos for cheaping out and not following the community norm?
  • LockAndLol 6y ago
    Would a restrictive open-source license even have stopped them? Would any American court fine an American mega-company over something like this? How does that even work, anyway? If the developer were outside of America, would it still have to be taken to the country where the company resides? There's no international court I know of that would handle these kind of things.
• curiousgal 6y ago
  > Not necessary as per the APLv2 license The conversation ends there, doesn't it?
  • andi999 6y ago
    Is this a typo and shd ve GPLv2?
    • ratsimihah 6y ago
      https://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0 https://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0
      • andi999 6y ago
        Thanks. But is this standard to abbreviate to APLv2? I only knew the language APL and the apache license is normally abbreviated apache-v2, or so, isnt it?
  • Hamuko 6y ago
    Well, the legal one at least. Morals are another thing, but maybe that's not really Amazon's concern.
  • 3pt14159 6y ago
    Not really. The conversation goes on as long as we like. Part of OSS is about trust and reputation. AWS could have really helped the maintainer with a single sentence and they didn't. It's like not saying thanks to the barista when you get your coffee. Not the end of the world, but it's still a touch rude.
    • romanovcode 6y ago
      When you are a huge company you have to be careful about saying thanks to Barista. Maybe the developers would like to say thanks to barista but lawyers said to the developers to not talk to the barista no matter what since it's safer to say nothing than risk saying something wrong.
• victorantos 6y ago
  He just wanted some attention. And he got it.
  • throwaway4good 6y ago
    Developers just want to be loved.
  • lki876 6y ago
    He deserves it.
• throwaway4good 6y ago
  You were giving it away so someone else made a business out of it ...
• hehetrthrthrjn 6y ago
  "free software for me but not for thee"
  • StavrosK 6y ago
    I'd actually support a license that said "it's OSS except Google/Amazon can't take my thing, launch as a service and charge for it".
    • hackerfromthefu 6y ago
      Amen
    • hehetrthrthrjn 6y ago
      I have no problem with that, but don't pretend that someone is abusing your license when you didn't stipulate. If fact someone should come up with a well written licence that adds conditions when the licensee revenue is over a certain (large) amount, like say royalties. Everyone should be happy with that.
  • smt923 6y ago
    that kinda implies two equal parties instead of a solo dev doing something in their spare time vs an evil megacorp
• ChrisRR 6y ago
  Why choose to publish open source if you then complain about people using your code? If he didn't want that, he should've used a non-commercial clause I assume he personally thanked all of the technologies that he's used as well?
  • bryanlarsen 6y ago
    Because all the author wanted was credit, and there's no appropriate license for that. The 4 clause BSD license has dropped out of favor for several good reasons and nothing else has taken its place.
    • barkingcat 6y ago
      You know that licenses are able to be written and rewritten right? If someone wanted attribution, someone could hire a lawyer and make a license (or make an edit/fork of an existing license) that does what someone needs. Giving attribution (and monetary compensation) to the lawyers who make open source licensing function is also a thing.
      • ludocode 6y ago
        He wrote some code and gave it away freely, and all he wanted was a thank you. You say he should have hired a lawyer to write his own license. This is absurd.
        • levosmetalo 6y ago
          If that's what he wanted what stopped him from adding one more paragraph to the licence saying something similar to: "The USER is required to publicly thank AUTHOR, and make the thanking reproducible in every copy of the derived work that uses this software." You don't need a lawyer for that. And if someone wants to use his work without attribution, they are free to negotiate a copy with different licence terms directly with the author and provide a compensation.
          • 6y ago
• jbezos64 6y ago
  cheers Tim it's mine now
  • nvr219 6y ago
    Oh snap it's Jeff
    • boltefnovor 6y ago
      Quick everyone stop talking, Jeff’s here.
• timdorr 6y ago
  Does anyone know where the source code is hosted? If they forked that project, doesn't it need to be made public?
  • AnssiH 6y ago
    No, unless the license requires it. In this case it does not.
  • deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
• oefrha 6y ago
  Taking permissively licensed open source code without so much of an attribution obviously sucks, but I can’t quite see the evidence that this is a fork? Same concept, sure. Code generated is similar but different enough, and there aren’t really many ways to express the similar bits... Interface isn’t exactly breakthrough either, anyone would have used a textarea + buttons. (Only looked at the screenshots.) Can someone check the source code of the extension? (It's certainly weird that 30+ comments in, everyone else is taking sides without even questioning the IMO not terribly well supported premise.) Edit: Okay, judging from NOTICES.txt it is.
  • Closi 6y ago
    It is the same code - Someone on Twitter noticed that if you download the Chrome extension and look in the notices.txt file of that bundle, the first line reads puppeteer-recorder v0.7.2
  • xmaayyy 6y ago
    It's in the third or fourth tweet that the link to his website is in the extensions https://twitter.com/maxibanki/status/1317071448322789376?s=19 https://twitter.com/maxibanki/status/1317071448322789376?s=1...
• ilaksh 6y ago
  It does seem like the license should have asked for a mention if that's what he wanted. However. He has every right to point out that they are using his code. And I think it would be at least polite to mention that, and it is in my opinion impolite not to mention it. And actually a little misleading when they don't mention using an open source system that is similar. And it's not like the fact that he didn't say that in his license means he is not allowed to mention he made that software. So I think better late than never, put the requirements you want in the license for credit. Or go AGPL or whatever. Although obviously that's not retroactive on the previous version. This also proves that someone thinks it's a business. So I feel like there might be an opportunity to launch a competitor, with a main advantage that they have the actual talent that created the system.
  • Lightbody 6y ago
    Worth noting: he _has_ a competing business. It was started before Amazon launched theirs in fact. Checkly, his startup, does synthetic monitoring, which Amazon got into after he was already into it.
    • tnolet 6y ago
      Yes, AWS’s canary service competes directly with my company https://checklyhq.com https://checklyhq.com This is fine of course. We have many competitors.
• sheeshkebab 6y ago
  Are there open source licenses that specifically ban major cloud providers from using software and letting others use it on Apache 2 terms? Specially license tailored against every one of them, by name?
  • tannhaeuser 6y ago
    It won't take long until OSI heads come in and tell you that sort of licensing isn't "Open Source" (a commonly used term they bogusly claim exclusive control over). Who's financing OSI again?
  • EamonnMR 6y ago
    AGPL tries to do this but it's otherwise similar to GPL rather than Apache 2.
    • tannhaeuser 6y ago
      AGPL in no way prevents anyone to use the licensed software. It just demands, like GPL, that modifications be made available to users, but in addition to GPL, extends this duty to the case where the licensed software is used remotely/as a service (rather than "distributed" to users for use on their own computer).
      • EamonnMR 6y ago
        Which in theory should prevent you from getting AWS'd
  • enriquto 6y ago
    No need to mention them by name. Just use the AGPL, for they are all irrationally allergic to it. EDIT: notice that usage of the AGPL produces the desired effect, while still being free software (which it wouldn't be the case if you excluded specific users in your license terms).
    • ojosilva 6y ago
• lovetocode 6y ago
  Congrats!
• guhcampos 6y ago
  Despite the legalisms that may or not may be relevant, and despite being Amazon or any big company. I could bet a decent amount that AWS legal department does not even know this was forked from OSS. This is probably some dev or PM who found out about the project and decided they were in-line for a promotion using someone else's work.
• LoSboccacc 6y ago
  2. Grant of Copyright License. Subject to the terms and conditions of this License, each Contributor hereby grants to You a perpetual, worldwide, non-exclusive, no-charge, royalty-free, irrevocable copyright license to reproduce, prepare Derivative Works of, publicly display, publicly perform, sublicense, and distribute the Work and such Derivative Works in Source or Object form if you wanted a nod, add a "give me a nod if you fork" clause, you're allowed to.
  • dividedbyzero 6y ago
    IANAL, but I believe that may make your license practically unenforceable, because all precedents can be argued to not apply because of that change, and even if untrue, just having that sort of argument in court quickly gets prohibitively expensive.
• jasode 6y ago
  There are some replies in this thread that misunderstood the content of Tim Nolet's twitter post. (Probably because the short headline has pitchfork raising overtones.) - He's not complaining that Amazon forked his code with Apache license. He admits he also uses other open source with permissive licenses - He just thought it would be nice/courteous/polite/etc if Amazon acknowledge/recognized/credited/mentioned/thanked his original project that they forked from. The twitter reply of "user facing open source should have been AGPL" and replies in this thread of "you used the wrong license" don't really cover it. In other words, I'm not aware of a permissive license that's the same as BSD/Apache with the only difference in that also says "use it as you wish but you must mention my name when you're a commercial enterprise making a splashy product announcement".
  • LoSboccacc 6y ago
    ...you can just add a clause E: who downvoted this, care to explain? have you ever eard of the jslint license? you can add the fuck you want to one's software terms
    • tomrod 6y ago
      Just like they could have added the owner's name.
      • LoSboccacc 6y ago
        no? why would they? they are complying with everything dude asked for and mind reading is not in mandatory training as of yet. if you want a nod if used as a part of a software, just add it!
        • tomrod 6y ago
          It's good practice to cite your sources. Even if you're strictly legal, being ethical doesn't hurt.
          • 6y ago
• amanzi 6y ago
  To be fair, in a follow up tweet he says, "...I'm not mad, that would be hypocritical..." He knows that Amazon are playing within the rules.
• deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
• cmaker10 6y ago
  Could everyone take a moment here and reflect on their hostile attitude towards an open source author who just wants to be treated fairly (in a moral sense)? My guess is that none of the people who are lecturing and gloating have ever written anything substantial. Shame on you.
  • asdasdasdas5453 6y ago
    I am baffled by the comments as well.
  • pjmlp 6y ago
    I have, but all of it was behind commercial licenses, because there is idealism and then there is the real world. As for the author, it sucks, but companies, moral and law, don't stand on the same side of the balance.
  • hackerfromthefu 6y ago
    Yeah part of the social contract for open source is people get appreciation, respect, and visibility in exchange for their contributions ..
    • deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
    • fourseventy 6y ago
      says who?
    • whatsmyusername 6y ago
      The license does not require that.
  • johncena33 6y ago
    The issue here is HN loves Amazon. That's why you are seeing the hostility. If it was Google doing that, I can guarantee you the HN response would be radically different.
  • 6y ago
• varispeed 6y ago
  By law you need to pay for accepted work at least the minimum wage. My question is whether AWS is breaking the law by appropriating someone else work without payment? Or do you think something like this should be regulated? I see this as a loophole, where companies can gain useful projects without having to pay wages.
• pokemapper 6y ago
  Here's another example of AWS interactions with OSS: instead of contributing a perfectly good and non-AWS dependant feature to an upstream project (PGBouncer, for a strictly PostgreSQL-level useful feature) they decided to rather stretch it and publish their changes as a _patch_ to the upstream project instead, with a different, restrictive license that only allows its usage on AWS services, together with examples on how to use it on RDS/Redshift: https://github.com/awslabs/pgbouncer-rr-patch/ https://github.com/awslabs/pgbouncer-rr-patch/ https://github.com/awslabs/pgbouncer-rr-patch/issues/3 https://github.com/awslabs/pgbouncer-rr-patch/issues/3
  • MatthewMcDonald 6y ago
    It's worth mentioning that this isn't just a case of people not being able to use the patch outside of AWS; the patch is actually impeding pgbouncer from implementing a similar feature: > We'd like to rewrite such features for pgbouncer from the ground up but it is impossible to prove to the lawyer that the re-writing is not kind of "derivative works". I believe it is not what you expected, as an opensource project that derived benefit from the whole pgbouncer community.
  • robocat 6y ago
    Interesting: “3.3 Use Limitation. The Work and any derivative works thereof only may be used or intended for use with the web services, computing platforms or applications provided by Amazon.com, Inc. or its affiliates, including Amazon Web Services, Inc.” from https://github.com/awslabs/pgbouncer-rr-patch/blob/master/LICENSE.txt https://github.com/awslabs/pgbouncer-rr-patch/blob/master/LI... Is this a one off activity, or does Amazon do this regularly as part of their moat?
  • GordonS 6y ago
    That's some really, really shitty behaviour - it actively seeks to screw over an OSS project they benefit financially from! Given how much AWS relies on developers, it boggles the mind how they get away with this kind of behaviour.
• dan1234 6y ago
  Looks like they did give some attribution in the NOTICES.txt https://twitter.com/maxibanki/status/1317071448322789376 https://twitter.com/maxibanki/status/1317071448322789376
  • mxschmitt 6y ago
    Yeah buts not visible to the enduser or be rewarded in any way. You have to download the CRX (Chrome extension) file yourself, extract it and then you could see the content of the NOTICES.txt...
• dak1 6y ago
  I'm extremely disappointed to see how many comments on here focus on the very narrow legal questions and amount to: "Your license didn't say they couldn't." Open source software is more than a license and code. It is a community and the digital public square. And the Tragedy of the Commons is just as applicable to our public square as it is to William Forster Lloyd's common land. Either we as a community hold ourselves and others within our community to a higher standard than the text of a license, or licenses will inevitably become increasingly restrictive in the future, to the detriment of all.
  • CydeWeys 6y ago
    This, incidentally, is why I tend to prefer the AGPL for stuff I write myself, as it aligns most closely with this "digital public square" idea. I'd simply rather not have an Amazon use my work in this sort of taking-without-giving way at all. Meanwhile, the open source code I write for my employer is Apache 2.0 licensed because the permissive licenses seem to be the most friendly towards large corporations and hence is what they prefer.
  • frabert 6y ago
    Honestly, this point is kind of nonsense to me. If people acted as if they were held to the higher standard, we would not need licenses. People (especially when they're not acting alone, e.g. corporations) act in their monetary interest, most of the time. Hence, stick to the license that's least restrictive that still ticks all the boxes you feel are important. If you feel attribution is important, choose a license that makes it legally binding.
    • josalhor 6y ago
      If I suggest an idea from a coworker in a meeting as if it was mine, that move would be seen, at the very least, as somewhat rude. If I got that idea from examining the competition, that would be seen as a smart move. Sure, if attribution is a requirement then the natural thing to do is to turn it into a legal requirement. But I don't think that is the discussion here. It comes down to how we want to treat open source. In order to encourage open source, I believe giving credit, even if not required, is courteous. Corporations are not monolithic entities that are perfectly defined. People work on these corporations.
• deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
• ericls 6y ago
  Is it possible to have a license that have different requirements for human beings and non-human beings(organizations, corporations, bots, etc). It feel like the author is upset because AWS is not a human being.
• senko 6y ago
  Open Source authors need to be educated about the rights they give up with various licences, so they aren't "educated" in this way. Copyright licence is a legally binding document. You can talk about the community all you like, but the legal system doesn't give a damn. Sticking your head in the sand won't make the problem go away.
• code4tee 6y ago
  Guy writes some open source code and puts a license on it saying others can use it as they please. Someone else uses it. Guy goes on Twitter to complain someone used it without credit. In response to rant on Twitter someone points out that there actually is acknowledgement in the code. So in the end, they used it and gave him credit. Guy is like, oops, well that’s cool. Sigh.
• deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
• natmaka 6y ago
  Isn't the 'Attribution Assurance License' pertinent? https://opensource.org/licenses/AAL https://opensource.org/licenses/AAL
• whoevercares 6y ago
  It’s called “bias for action”. Actually AWS/Amazon operates like a United States of Startups and the decision is commonly made by team at the bottom of the org tree. So it’s likely a few engineers and managers decide to fork it just to launch something for their KPI. As long as their legal agrees, the leadership has no idea about how team do it
• preommr 6y ago
  Like with many things related to license and copyright, this is an issue of culture. Maybe programmers should realize it's in our common interest to have some kind of group voice. Other random groups with lower stakes seem to get concessions. How about instead of role-playing as lawyers, we realize that maybe they should've thrown this guy a bone in the form of an attribution purely for the purposes of etiquette.
• smusamashah 6y ago
  > Oh @awscloud I really do :Two hearts: you! But next time you fork my OS project https://github.com/checkly/headless-recorder https://github.com/checkly/headless-recorder and present it as your new service, give the maintainers a short "nice job, kids" or something. Not necessary as per the APLv2 license, but still, ya know? He is only nicely and asking for recognition/attribution while acknowledging that it's not required per licence. I don't know why people have to take sides or be angry about it. Just as amazon was free to take his project and make it their own, he is Free to mention the fact that someone is indeed selling his work without even giving an open mention.
  • hashkb 6y ago
    Are those on this forum not similarly free to express their judgment?
    • Aeolun 6y ago
      I guess they are. It would just be nice if they paused and check they made that judgement based on what they actually read, instead of the initial emotion they felt while reading.
  • loufe 6y ago
    To be fair: as mentioned elsewhere in the comments, Amazon did in fact credit him, and he admitted his mistake later in the Twitter thread.
    • kllrnohj 6y ago
      Incorrect. Amazon included the legally-required NOTICES, which isn't what he was asking for. And similarly the author did not admit any such mistake as no such mistake was made.
    • unreal37 6y ago
      There is no evidence that they "credited him" explicitly, merely that his source code, which they copied, included a link to his website.
• known 6y ago
  You may want to hire a qualified lawyer to "settle" the matter with Amazon;
• beshrkayali 6y ago
  I sympathize with the author of course, and tasteless tactic from AWS, but this is also why it's important to choose the appropriate license for what you want out of your project.
• 0xmohit 6y ago
  The OP posted "Show HN: Headless Recorder" <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24577642 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24577642> 22 days ago. Amazon forked and released it as a service. They are efficient.
  • RKearney 6y ago
    Wrong post. It was over 2 years ago. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17760536 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17760536
    • tnolet 6y ago
      Yeah, we renamed and relaunched it after adding Playwright support. Same project, code base etc. though
• cdnsteve 6y ago
  Congrats, your work was good enough to turn into a commercial project by a major top 3 cloud provider. That would make me feel like I would stand a little taller! You basically created a new AWS service, as v1, that's pretty cool to add to a CV ;) Just be patient, and make sure you figure out the colour of your Lambo now.
  • CydeWeys 6y ago
    The Lambo bit is rubbing salt in the wound, because the author isn't actually benefiting financially from this at all. Amazon is taking all of the profits. How's he supposed to compete against them?
    • thrav 6y ago
      I think the idea was that if they properly marketed their achievement, they could get Lambo level compensation at a big 3 cloud provider.
  • toyg 6y ago
    > Just be patient, and make sure you figure out the colour of your Lambo now. This is sarcasm, right? Right? Situations like this are precisely why the industry pushes so hard for APL and BSD/MIT, and against A/L/GPL: because you do the work and they make the money.
    • cdnsteve 6y ago
      Yes, I thought that was fairly obvious.
• bogwog 6y ago
  Situations like this make me wonder why no one has created an open source license with a clause excluding multi billion dollar companies. If your company makes more than, say, $50 billion in revenue per year or something crazy like that, then you need to pay for a license. Everyone else can use the free license. Amazon in particular is well known to be aggressively anti-competitive, as we saw with the Diapers.com fiasco. So logically, if you allow them to use your open source project for free, you run the risk of supporting the company that is going to run you out of business if they ever decide to compete with you. Might as well grab a piece of the pie on your way out!
  • Muromec 6y ago
    > with a clause excluding multi billion dollar companies. Every multi billion dollar company: runs subsidiary to not trigger legal threshold. They probably do it anyway for tax purposes.
    • varispeed 6y ago
      You can exclude companies that have multi billion company in their tree.
      • pas 6y ago
        So someone launches a new company that provides services for everyone, including billion dollar companies. Basically unless you put a non-commercial license on it, any effort to limit its use will be easily circumvented.
        • bogwog 6y ago
          The middle man increases costs and inefficiency for the billion dollar companies, giving a competitive advantage to everyone else. It's foolproof I tell ya!
        • varispeed 6y ago
          You cannot circumvent that. If you want to do a service for a company that has a multi billion company in the chain then you would have to get full commercial license and when that happens you simply raise an invoice to the client that covers this cost. It is pretty simple and you cannot get around it.
• deleted 6y ago
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• auggierose 6y ago
  I don't see why AWS shouldn't have to BUY a license from the developer. Why are developers giving away their work for free? If you require a thank you, you might just as well require them to pay you money. That's the only thank you from corporations that counts.
• rfrey 6y ago
  Much of the discussion in this thread has highlighted the difference between those who regard open source as a community and public good, and those who regard it as a resource to be exploited. The latter sees anything beyond legalistic compliance as an unreasonable expectation. Personally I'm disappointed with the exploitation view, but I also think it's an interesting example of how different assumptions lead groups to talk past each other. "AWS was in complete compliance, what's the problem?" versus "AWS violated the spirit of the community". Each camp agrees with the other camp's assertion but sees it as irrelevant.
  • bloodorange 6y ago
    What you call "exploitation view" is at the very core of a capitalistic mindset.
  • yourapostasy 6y ago
    The exploitation view is mostly due to the anonymous nature of those personal, natural person individuals performing the decision to exploit. The personal cost to them of the decision is muted if it is felt at all: the endless layers of the corporate body shields them. However, if their names attached to such decisions were plastered all over LinkedIn, GitHub, or the even the project "look who is using our project" page, the responsibility that went with that decision authority just went up a noticeable amount. With REST API access to graph-networked tracking of such decisions, someone's track record of these kinds of decisions will follow them. Forever. Such tracking will also start revealing companies with a certain track record. The consequences of that are up to those in the future making decisions whether to interact with those individuals. It could be neutral, beneficial, or adverse, depending upon who they deal with. Also, nothing prevents open source projects from tapping such aggregated data in an automated fashion, and auto-updating an exception to their open source license. "Anyone may license under <foo-open-source> license, except for the following list of individuals: ..., And except for the following list of companies: ..., <followed-by-legal-stuff-preventing-assignations-for-example>. For you, <consequence-decided-by-project>." Licenses are similarly amended to generate the attribution data in the first place. That consequence can be whatever strikes the fancy of the project. Whether it be must license commercially, must post a LinkedIn video of them singing "Good Ship Lollipop" before they can license under the open source license, must post an escrow bond they forfeit if they violate the terms, etc. Shine a light upon the natural person authority, and see who steps into the spotlight proud to show off their accountability.
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• hobofan 6y ago
  I'm surprised the author was even able to figure out that it was their code being used. AFAIK there are multiple headless recorders out there, so I would have assumed that it would be any of them.
• janOsch 6y ago
  In my mind there are two aspects on the matter: License - what AWS did is "legal", most commercial software is built on top of OSS. Decency - what AWS did was mean. They should at least acknowledge the author. Worst possible outcome of this thread: the community will become scared of big corporations stealing their hard work - this will stifle OSS creativity.
• Ensorceled 6y ago
  Is what AWS did legal? Yes. Ethical? Meh. Rude? Yes. Against the spirit of OSS? Hell yeah. Is the author calling them out fair. Yes. Also fair, me assuming everybody defending AWS here is a terrible person.
  • rakah 6y ago
    I agree. I'm not even sure I understand defending AWS here from a purely capitalist perspective. When a large company gives thanks to a open source developer they are encouraging that developer to continue contributing. That could possibly benefit the company in the future - to act otherwise doesn't seem to serve their own interests very well.
• dsabanin 6y ago
  Open source is getting perverse. Individual developers spend their free time developing a solution without making as much as a cent, while giant corporations are making billions on it. How did that become a thing?
  • krapp 6y ago
    What would you expect, that open source developers give their work away for free and corporations just pay them for it anyway? It became a "thing" because the incentives of FOSS software are to maximize developer freedom, not to ensure compensation for the developer. That doesn't change when the "developer" is a trillion dollar corporation.
  • tonyedgecombe 6y ago
    The irony is these corporations don't even value the software because they don't pay for it. Giving your software to them is like telling them your time is worth nothing. I preferred the days when there was a mass of small developers selling software to what we have now. It feels like we have gone backwards.
    • ThrowawayR2 6y ago
      > "The irony is these corporations don't even value the software because they don't pay for it. Giving your software to them is like telling them your time is worth nothing." I said that in the '90s, because it was obvious even back then, and it was drowned out by the "We're gonna destroy all the evil proprietary software giants and all code will be free forever, yeah!" chorus. It's nice to finally be vindicated.
  • pornel 6y ago
    That was always the plan. That's the essence of the difference between Open Source and Free Software. https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/open-source-misses-the-point.en.html https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/open-source-misses-the-point....
• peterwwillis 6y ago
  Twitter clap threads clap make clap bad clap articles In a month / year / etc when this thread gets deleted, there'll just be a HN comments section speculating about a missing twitter thread. The least we could do here is ask posters to capture the thread in a blog post along with a summary of points, so it doesn't have to be re-created in the comments here. This is potentially an important post that we want a historical record of, and Twitter is just not built for that.
• soumyadeb 6y ago
  Can there be a license - Permissive Open source for the rest of the world except the cloud providers? Or some kind of anti-monopolistic rule to protect open-source? The cloud providers taking over open-source projects, launching their own forks (with restrictive licenses) etc isn't great for the open-source ecosystem. If you take away the incentives for the developers (respect, fame, etc) to write open-source software, then isn't it kind of doomed in the long run?
  • offtop5 6y ago
    What about the new Amazon Intern who finds an awesome open source project. She now gets fired because open source means open only for some. The main value add is AWS is hosting it. Amazon isn't being an angel, they could of easily given the author a solid 20k donation as a thank you. Apart of releasing MIT or Apache licensed code is knowing someone else might take it and make millions. If you want to restrict your software usage you can use GPL.
    • soumyadeb 6y ago
      I hear you but GPL makes it hard for everyone else (most companies have policies against GPL). We run an open-source project and it's AGPL licensed for the exact same reason. But lot of orgs have blanket ban on AGPL. Maybe there is a way to define "bad" practices in OS outside of license. Similar to how monopolistic practices are banned in business because they are unhealthy for the broader ecosystem. Just asking
      • offtop5 6y ago
        Ohh I get your point. What I'm saying is if your not ok with the biggest company on Earth using your code you need to release it GPL. Dual licencing is also a strategy, GPL is free and commercial usage can be $5,000 a year or whatever.
• swazzy 6y ago
  Response from AWS: https://twitter.com/mjasay/status/1317084448119169024?s=21 https://twitter.com/mjasay/status/1317084448119169024?s=21
  • cute_boi 6y ago
    they are like every body uses opensource we too used ........
• FirstLvR 6y ago
  what the fork
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• orasis 6y ago
  Is anyone aware of a source available license that can be used/modified by others? Redis Labs won’t let others use their license.
• 43423434 6y ago
  Love the comments here siding with a 1.70 trillion dollar megacap company over an open source developer.
• scarface74 6y ago
  An official response from someone at AWS. Matt Asay @mjasay · Tim, I run the open source strategy and marketing team at AWS. I hadn't been aware of this but am looking into it. (Regardless of anything we may have done, thank you for what you clearly have done with your project) Standard Disclaimer: I’m a consultant at AWS. Opinions are my own.
• mjasay 6y ago
  I run the open source strategy and marketing team at AWS. As I told Tim privately and publicly (https://twitter.com/mjasay/status/1317084448119169024 https://twitter.com/mjasay/status/1317084448119169024), I hadn't been aware of this but am talking with the relevant product team to see how we can improve in his regard. AWS uses a lot of open source, and we contribute a lot, both in terms of code (first-party projects like Firecracker and Bottlerocket, but also third-party projects like Redis, GraphQL, Open Telemetry, etc.), testing, credits, foundation support, and more. But open source is ultimately about people and communities, and I personally feel we could have done more to acknowledge the great work Tim and his co-maintainers have done, and try to support their Headless Recorder work. We're talking with Tim now about this. (While I think we do far better than sometimes acknowledged, we're also always looking to improve, and appreciate all the feedback that helps us toward that goal.)
  • rickspencer3 6y ago
    I know Matt. I'm impressed that AWS hired him for this. That's a promising sign.
  • unreal37 6y ago
    Good job taking responsibility, Matt. Handling this the right way. I do think there's a larger discussion about trillion dollar companies just forking a project and announcing it as a new feature for their platform without even talking to the original creator. If there's anything to improve, "reach out first" will be a start. It's open source. You don't have to reach out. There's nothing legally or morally wrong with what you did. But you can do better. A trillion dollar company can do better to act grateful to be in the position that it's in. To be seen as a leader in a space instead of as a consumer of free work.
    • eitland 6y ago
      > If there's anything to improve, "reach out first" will be a start. Just don't repeat Microsofts smooth talk, make-your-own and ghost strategy ;-) It is possibly even worse than just forking.
    • 6y ago
• jasonhansel 6y ago
  This is why we use the AGPL.
• jitendrac 6y ago
  That is totally fair according to the license used, even I don't find anything bad with it. Rather its a good portfolio item for oss developer. Next thing which developer can do is, check if amazon is up-streaming new updates and bugfixes to their product, are they contributing to the existing open issues for bug-fixing,if yes that's win-win for both. if you are planning to leverage the project for commercial product, I would suggest future dual-licensing clause which is like "Any contribution to the project will be licensed under AGPL, and XYZ LLP will get its copy as a full ownership with WTFPL license exclusively". Add an enterprise plan for your product where big corps can purchase its code license directly from you for fair price to get it under GPL/Apache license. just my 2 cents.
• victor9000 6y ago
  Elastic Search ran into this same problem and came up with the Elastic License. In particular, it stipulates that you may not: > use Elastic Software Object Code for providing time-sharing services, any software-as-a-service, service bureau services or as part of an application services provider or other service offering (collectively, "SaaS Offering") where obtaining access to the Elastic Software or the features and functions of the Elastic Software is a primary reason or substantial motivation for users of the SaaS Offering to access and/or use the SaaS Offering ("Prohibited SaaS Offering"); https://raw.githubusercontent.com/elastic/elasticsearch/master/licenses/ELASTIC-LICENSE.txt https://raw.githubusercontent.com/elastic/elasticsearch/mast...
• lolsal 6y ago
  This is the other side of the open-source coin in my opinion. The freedom to fork and do your own thing is great when you're fighting The Man (somehow) but it seems different when The Man does it to you or one of your projects. I personally am of the opinion that AWS doesn't own the author anything, even acknowledgement.
• masukomi 6y ago
  I really wish, that when COs like Amazon decided to productize a thing they either offered the core developer(s) enough $ to work on it full time (if they wanted) or a job to do that with a guarantee that as long as it was a product, and they wanted to work on it, they'd be allowed to continue. Problem with offering job is the likelyhood of getting redirected to some other unrelated work. instead of forking they could work with core devs to see if they wanted to support the desired features (potentially with an NDA until release). this big co strategy of "mine. I profit now. everyone who built up this useful thing can suck eggs" really sucks and sucks for the humans and sucks for Open Source.
  • wang_li 6y ago
    It seems like you're arguing that people should get both the good will of having an open source license and the profits of a closed source license. Which comes across as disingenuous.
    • oauea 6y ago
      No, it's just good sense. If you're adopting an open source project then you clearly think the project has merit. So the people who created this project should be considered for maintaining the company fork, since they clearly know what they're doing.
      • geodel 6y ago
        But other companies, individuals may want to go in different direction taking current code as base. This is not a good reason to hire original author.
      • kortilla 6y ago
        That doesn’t follow. There have been many projects that I’ve seen forked internally because the original author didn’t know how to write tests, maintain performance, etc. Open source projects are often very poorly maintained so being the steward of one that’s interesting does not actually qualify you to productize it for a company.
• baybal2 6y ago
  That's how opensource works? I see no issue here whatsoever.
• dragonwriter 6y ago
  If you offer a license that doesn't require something, don't be surprised when people accept it and do only what is required by the license. That's literally the deal you offered.
  • rickspencer3 6y ago
    Honestly, I agree with this. Your ethical standards should be encoded in the license. OTH, if you treat people like a jerk (for example by forking their code and not involving or crediting them) there are practical social repercussions from that, but probably AWS is not much impacted by that.
• franklampard 6y ago
  Great PR move from Tim. He seized the opportunity to advertise his product on the topic article on HN.
• deleted 6y ago
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• kevmo 6y ago
  Jeff Bezos is the richest man in the world because he underpays labor. Taking open source code without even a cursory attribution is completely within the ethos of Amazon.
• zelly 6y ago
  If you don't want someone to copy it, don't put it up on the internet.
• tuna-piano 6y ago
  If Amazon employees started tipping 0% at restaurants in Seattle, they would be legally correct. But that would certainly impact the way restaurants needed to operate. Sometimes communities get built up on a shared system that involves a certain amount of shame, embarrassment and feelings of communal good and following norms in order to continue. Open source software seems to be that type of community. Sure, you can be a freerider and tip 0%, but at a certain point others in the community may glare at you with a "really?" face and of course restaurants will eventually just raise their prices.
  • qvrjuec 6y ago
    Interesting analogy, because a growing trend in Seattle restaurants is eschewing tipping entirely for a fixed % gratuity included in the bill. I agree with the other commenters in the thread - if you're peeved because you didn't get something your permissive license didn't require, choose a new license.
  • sequoia 6y ago
    Fantastic analogy: tipping is a vestige of a culture of patronage and servitude and a practice that doesn't exist (in the same form) in most of Europe for example, where servers rely on an explicit obligation of payment rather than "whatever the customer feels like giving." Just as tipping is a shitty system and the explicit & transparent European model is better, so is using a license that clearly spells out (requires) the type of attribution you want better than relying on vague implicit expectations.
  • xigency 6y ago
    I hear you, but tipping is a widely accepted practice. As a software developer I use tons of open source software and I'm aware of how much open source software is used in commercial products I use as well. And still I can't recall seeing credits with the original developers' names ever outside of a license file. I'm not saying that is good or bad, but it doesn't seem to be standard practice.
• znpy 6y ago
  can't wait to see this story commented on n-gate.
• Rapzid 6y ago
  I'll comment in a different direction. I'm personally not a huge fan of these #SeleniumNotSelenium projects. A few only support a single browser, like Chrome, while utilizing selenium webdriver directly gives you access to all browsers with relative ease. They all seem to be trying to funnel you into a related SaaS product. Selenium webdriver JS could really use some extra support from the community. 4.0 has been alpha for over three years.
• aloukissas 6y ago
  It seems to my untrained eyes that this was a poor choice of OSS license. See a recent discussion from earlier this week about how Plausible switched licenses for this reason: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24763734 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24763734
• sequoia 6y ago
  A note to the "I'm seeing a lot of comments here" crowd, i.e. people saying "shame on you!" to commenters who point out that the author's expectations of how consumers should use his code are at variance with the license terms he released the code under: I'm seeing a lot of comments here that are attempting to brow beat or bully people for having a view you disagree with. "The author should have used a different license." This is an opinion, we can disagree about it. There's no need to tell people to be ashamed for disagreeing with you, or to make baseless ad hominem attacks such as 'I bet none of you have ever written anything substantial.' This is a discussion forum. FS/OSS licensing is an extremely contentious subject as everyone in the OS community probably already knows. People are going to disagree. Let's keep this a clean fight where we discuss the merits of different arguments and attack arguments rather than attacking people, shall we? Trying to "shame" people who disagree with you or talk about how "disappointed" you are in them or maligning their professional work is not argumentation, it's bullying. EDIT: while writing this comment, someone called me "autistic" in another sub-thread here. Gave me a chuckle... anyway add that to the ad-hom pile.
• bawolff 6y ago
  Meh, if you're not ok with someone forking your project, don't release it under a license that allows forking. Yes, a nod back is nice, but its not a requirement and we shouldn't use public opinion to try to put extra obligations on the reusers beyond what the license requires. Especially if its beyond what would probably be considered a valid osi approved license.
• riemannzeta 6y ago
  Wondering how the decision in Oracle v. Google might affect Amazon's practices in this regard.
• fractalb 6y ago
  I heard people complaining about GPL that it is virus and is not business friendly. I'm just confused now. What's all these business friendly licenses about then?
• sabujp 6y ago
  this is what you get for licensing under APL
• brainless 6y ago
  For anyone who is saying "your license allows it": These licenses were created pre-cloud era when on-premise was a thing and "Intranet" was a word. I grew fond of open source from high-school days as a kid in India because I felt the power that everyone is sharing their best creations for me to learn from. The spirit of open source, at least to me dates back to 1998. Things have changed, a few providers host everything for every business. Do you feel open source would have taken same approach if started now?
• Animats 6y ago
  That's what the GPL is intended to prevent.
• jeena 6y ago
  What I don't quite understand is the logic of choosing a license which explicitly allows this and then getting mad that someone does what the license allows to do, why did you choose that license then?
• throwawaysea 6y ago
  Without knowing the details and veracity of the claims, I think there is a real danger with big companies like Amazon using their weight to take others' innovations and reap the rewards for themselves. Now that it's a megacorp, Amazon's employees are no longer the presumably highly talented people that got it started. That is, their newer successes are not a result of disproportionate talent or hard work that would make those successes deserved. Instead it's just another big company that has big capital. And all a big company with big capital needs to do is keep an eye on early successes elsewhere to get into the game, throw lots of resources at the problem, leverage their big mature sales and marketing channels, and see the Dollars roll in. This is not what a healthy market is meant to reward.
• pacamara619 6y ago
  What licence did you use?
• snambi 6y ago
  The best part is most open source developers were convinced that "APL" or "MIT" is the best license for their software. Why? APL, MIT , BSD allows companies fork a project without acknowledgement or contributing back.
• maurys 6y ago
  Does anyone know the exact details of what Redis is using to prevent something like this? I think they have a clause saying you can't provide Redis as a Service without paying royalty. It does feel like we go in circles sometimes in tech, all these license discussions, closed v/s open v/s closed. I really hope AWS does the decent thing and acknowledges and maybe even donates to the project. This whole bit reeks of mercenary behaviour. Sure, the license allows it, but AWS still can afford to be a better citizen.
• burtonator 6y ago
  I'm going to get downvoted to hell but Open Source is broken. The initial egalitarian view of OSS never came to fruition. OSS is just companies like Google and Facebook throwing things on the other side of the fence to help their own business monopolies. There aren't actually ANY OSS models where independent developers can make money to support their own code. It's all support and services for some of the intermediate companies or you have to be FANG. We need "free as in $19.95" for OSS where the code is open but licensing/payments are compelled. A way to look at it is "less freedom is more freedom". For example, if we had infinite freedom and no laws the world wouldn't work. So we compromise and accept the right amount of laws. I think it's the same thing with OSS ... we could all public domain our code but most people don't because putting your code under a license has value. It's LESS free than public domain but more free because you're giving a license to the user but they can't sue you because they're no implied warranty. If we had an a source code license that forced someone like Amazon to license the code we wouldn't be in this position.
• jgowdy 6y ago
  I don't understand why people get upset about this. It's called open source for a reason. If you want recognition when someone uses your open source project, pick a license that has an advertising clause. This is similar to other open source projects which GPL their project instead of AGPL, and then get angry when people and companies (like Amazon), literally abide by the terms of your license but you don't like the outcome. Then they act all offended like someone did something wrong. If you don't like it, switch your project to AGPL and stop trying to act like someone did anything but honor the license you released your code under. People like this do damage to open source because they blindly pick their licenses rather than understanding what they mean.
• ineedasername 6y ago
  How is a "canary" script that simulates user interactions with a page different than something like selenium/splinter? Is it just the ux of accomplishing it via recorded actions, or something more?
• ikiris 6y ago
  You picked a license that allows this, what did you expect? It seems to me they did exactly what you expected them to by the terms of your public api, and are bitter the leapordsateyourface
• darepublic 6y ago
  I finally clicked the link instead of reading the comments and was amazed to see it's the extension I discovered earlier on HN and have been using for a while.
• darepublic 6y ago
  Amazon and Microsoft have been trending upward in evilness this past year
• zerop 6y ago
  They also wrap up open source software presto as some aws service.... What's one substantial thing Amazon open sourced ?
• throwaway189262 6y ago
  I'm increasingly sympathetic to the hardcore GPL hawks, maybe they were right all along. At this point I think it's plausible that the only reason commercial forks haven't "embrace extend extinguish" Linux is the GPL. I'll certainly be considering the GPL if I start any open source projects, giant corporations have no morals.
• skyzyx 6y ago
  Amazon did the same thing to me — the AWS SDK for PHP. Except that they hired me, but then began telling me what I could and could not do with the project, how I was/wasn't allowed to talk about it, and forced me to drop support for services that they didn't want to support + I wasn't allowed to communicate to customers why. A couple of years later, they brought on the creator of Boto (AWS SDK for Python), but I bitched at them so much to make absolutely sure that what happened to me wouldn't happen to Mitch. Boto is still an independent OSS project today.
  • skyzyx 6y ago
    Getting AWS to release code on GitHub? That was me. Allowing AWS developers to communicate with people on Stack Overflow? Me. The creation of the `awslabs` GitHub org? Me. The core concepts behind AWS Lambda? Me. SDK features like _waiters_? Me. Publicly sharing the internal service models so that people could built new tools for AWS? Me. Me, fighting against the internal Amazon culture tooth-and-nail to try to get them to do things that were in the best interests of AWS customers. Some of the most brilliant and customer-centric people I've ever worked with got ran out of there by management (well, one particular engineering director) after 18-24 months. All the fighting led to them trying to "manage me out" (making my life a living hell, hoping to make me quit), so I decided to stay for a full 4 years in order to vest every ounce of my stock grants, before walking away in 2014 (six months before AWS released "Lambda"). If things are better there now, that's really great for the people who work there. But it was a hell-scape for me to try to bring AWS into the modern age for open-source software in such a backwards-ass internal culture.