6 ms·

> AWS stomped on open source projects - despite the clear desire of projects like Elasticsearch, Redis, and MongoDB not to be cloned and monetized, AWS pushed a

by tedivm 5mo ago

> AWS stomped on open source projects - despite the clear desire of projects like Elasticsearch, Redis, and MongoDB not to be cloned and monetized, AWS pushed ahead with OpenSearch, Valkey, and DocumentDB anyway, capturing the hosted-service money after those communities and companies had built the markets; the result was a wave of defensive licenses like SSPL, Elastic License, RSAL, and other source-available models designed less to stop ordinary users than to stop AWS from stripping open-source infrastructure for parts, owning the customer relationship. This is completely backwards, at least with OpenSearch and Valkey. AWS didn't create the forks until after the upstream projects changed their license, so it's really weird to say that the forks "resulted" in the license changes when those forks where a response to the license changes. With Valkey in particular it was members of the former redis core development team that created Valkey.

deleted 5mo ago
[deleted]
hankerapp 5mo ago
A lot of these projects work on a business model where they open-source their core product, and provide advanced services, installation, maintenance or fully-managed services around their product. AWS was bypassing them by providing fully-managed services. On this, I am on the side of the people behind the projects. Basically AWS was eating their lunch. They had no choice but to change the licenses.
- rpdillon 5mo ago
  They have a problem with their business model, then. License changes to a formerly open source project are costly. The community reacts very strongly when license terms change after they've come to depend on a product, and they should. Why do we apply this standard to MongoDB but not to Apache, Linux, Postgres, or MariaDB? One purpose of an open source license is to allow many providers to provide the service. As I've talked about here previously, Elasticsearch wasn't able to provide the service I needed, so I had to move to AWS. It's weird to me that the Hacker News community doesn't think that sort of competition is good. The narrative seems to be that all these businesses are somehow victims of AWS, when it seems the truth is much more straightforward: they provided open source software and people used it. The fact that their business had no working plan to actually monetize that foundation should not be taken out on the community.
  - cyanydeez 5mo ago
    Walmart pulling up top a small town, opening a single business, paying everyone minimum wage is not 'competition is good'. Just try a little bit of understanding.
    - tonyedgecombe 5mo ago
      Maybe it is for the consumer. When Aldi opened in my nearest town my food bill dropped by 20%.
      - gobdovan 5mo ago
        That's the desired outcome of competition but the effects can go all over the place and the second-order effects in fragile towns can matter more than the price drop. As an extreme example, some people may lose their jobs, local spending may fall, some small shops may close and Aldi may pull out too, so everybody loses (here's [0] as an approximate example). Usually a community can tolerate changes only when it's not already near the bottom. When you're near the bottom, almost any destabilisation can kill your little system. [0] https://www.fox32chicago.com/news/aldi-closes-west-pullman-chicago https://www.fox32chicago.com/news/aldi-closes-west-pullman-c...
      - cyanydeez 5mo ago
        Aldi is a grwat example of a socially discipled capitalism.
        throwaway2037 5mo ago
        Can you explain you intent behind "socially" in your comment? I don't understand it.
    - surajrmal 5mo ago
      Arguably the town is at fault for choosing to permit Walmart to open in their town in that analogy. If you want to control the negative externalities of capitalism you can't just expect to not provide regulations and hope things will work out. Even if it weren't AWS, someone else with enough determination could use the same open source code to create a compelling alternative taking away business from the original authors. Trying to use social norms to make people not do that is not effective. You need mechanisms that can be enforced via legal procedures to be effective.
- skywhopper 5mo ago
  Just because they picked a bad business model doesn’t mean they deserve to avoid competition. Don’t give away your source code if you don’t want someone else to provide hosting.
  - harrall 5mo ago
    You’re not wrong but if people didn’t, all our companies would be using Oracle and Microsoft SQL Server and paying Larry Ellison instead today.
    - mpyne 5mo ago
      PostgreSQL is doing fine even with AWS having a multitude of hosted offerings. Maybe the business model / community-governance model does matter after all...
      - petepete 5mo ago
        PostgreSQL doesn't have a pro/officially supported version though.
        mpyne 5mo ago
        Sure they do. AWS RDS, Azure Database for PostgreSQL, etc. are all "pro" / "officially supported" deployments of PostgreSQL. On top of that the PostgreSQL official website even lists a whole table full of vendors from whom you can get commercial support at https://www.postgresql.org/support/professional_support/northamerica/ https://www.postgresql.org/support/professional_support/nort... Bringing faux open source into the world isn't a justification for adopting an infeasible business model and then complaining that your business doesn't compete very well.
        hunterpayne 5mo ago
        Enjoy all new OpenSource projects being open in name only then.
- mpyne 5mo ago
  > They had no choice but to change the licenses. Then why did they advertise themselves as open-source efforts when they weren't? They should have been the best possible providers of managed service offerings given they wrote the software they'd be managing, no? Why are monopolies OK here but not elsewhere? Choosing a hard-to-win business model is not supposed to be a choice that guarantees you business income.
  - streetfighter64 5mo ago
    I've got a field of strawberries, and I put up a sign, "free to pick by yourself, or pay 10$ for a pre-picked basket". Then Amazon comes in, starts sending their workers to pick my strawberries, and sell them for 5$ a basket. Was I then lying when I advertised the strawberries as free in my original sign, if I now want to change it to stop them from doing that?
    - mpyne 5mo ago
      I'm sorry, but "or pay $10 for a pre-picked basket" is not an open source product, because "free to pick" was the other option for an open source product. "free to pick by yourself" is the equivalent a proprietary freeware product, not an open-source product, because it excludes the idea of others picking strawberries. If that's your thing then by all means license it as such. But call it proprietary rather than open source. Some companies make a living off a model of "free to pick as needed for as long as you agree to help tend the future strawberries held in common, even if your competitors pick strawberries. Or you can pay $10 for your own exclusive plot of land and no requirement to let others past your fence". But that's not the model Redis was trying to use.
      - streetfighter64 4mo ago
        You're really torturing the analogy in a way that isn't comprehensible at all. But if your point is that "open source" is a bad license that most people who use it come to regret later, then yes, I agree, and they probably shouldn't have advertised as open source from the beginning.
  - 5mo ago
- colechristensen 5mo ago
  A lot of these projects started as community driven and funded open source efforts that eventually the creators decided to make a professional services company as a sponsor -> that company takes over nearly all of the development -> they relicense when they realize the funding they raised isn't going to be paid back. They're all just rug pulls when the creators want to get rich off of their open product and realize they can't after raising tens of millions. I'd have a lot more sympathy if the story wasn't "closing an open project so we can pay investors"
- 0123456789ABCDE 5mo ago
  isn't it that a lot of these projects start as open-source, then try to bank on that free labor, by switching licenses?
ceejayoz 5mo ago
> it's really weird to say that the forks "resulted" in the license changes when those forks where a response to the license changes But those license changes were a response to how AWS was monetizing their work in ways unsustainable for the upstream projects.
- jgalt212 5mo ago
  Yes, this was my impression as well.
- embedding-shape 5mo ago
  > But those license changes were a response to how AWS was monetizing their work in ways unsustainable for the upstream projects Or seen from the other side, these projects chose initial licenses that didn't fit with their wants for how others should use their project, in this mind. If you use a license that gives people the freedom to host your project as a service and make money that way, without paying you, and your goal was to make money that specific way, it kind of feels like you chose the wrong license here. What was unsustainable (considering this perspective) was less that outside actors did what they were allowed to do, and more that they chose a license that was incompatible with their actual goals.
  - ceejayoz 5mo ago
    The situation changed. A license that's the right choice at one point may not be the right license a decade later.
    - embedding-shape 5mo ago
      Agree, as long as existing contributors agree the license should be changed, projects should feel free to do so, no harm, no foul.
    - ncruces 5mo ago
      That's fair, but forking the FOSS version is also an adequate response.
stavros 5mo ago
Of course AWS didn't create the forks until the projects changed their license to disallow AWS from making money from their code! That's the whole point here.
- jasonlotito 5mo ago
  When they changed their license, they were no longer open source. They could have chosen open source licenses such as the AGPL, but they did not. They were a non-open source company at that point, and AWS was putting out a product build on open source. Simple as that. Redis was not an open source company when AWS moved to Valkey. Companies are free to license under the AGPL if they want. Or other open source licenses. Sorry, but non-open source companies aren't getting sympathy from me because they are hating on open source projects.
  - stavros 5mo ago
    These were open source projects that had to change licenses away from open source because of AWS. I'm not sure how the OSS companies are the bad guy here.
    - sokoloff 5mo ago
      I think there's plenty of room for people to object to the "had to change licenses" framing. They chose to change licenses, same as they chose the original license. That original license probably helped them with goodwill and to gain a community; when those benefits no longer exceeded the downsides of using that license, they changed licenses to one that suited them better. Naturally, this change costs them some amount of goodwill, a portion of the very goodwill that they harvested by choosing an open-source license in the first place.
      - stavros 5mo ago
        I don't see this as an issue with the company. They were happy to release their code as OSS, as long as that allowed them to make enough money to develop the software. It was a win/win, and them AWS came and took advantage of that. If you leave some apples at the side of the road, with a sign "$1 per apple" or whatever, and people largely pay enough for you to continue to pick apples, that's great. If someone starts coming every day and taking the entire crate, I don't blame you for discontinuing the convenient apple sales, I blame the thief.
2ndorderthought 5mo ago
Sometimes I wonder how much it would hurt Amazon to pay the creators and maintainers of OSS software they sell 1 cent per billing period of use(1 hr?). I also wonder how much money that would offer an oss team. To contribute risk free to improving the product
- richwater 5mo ago
  I think you would be surprised how many commits in OSS comes from paid workers of the various cloud companies and tech companies out there.
  - ninjagoo 5mo ago
    > I think you would be surprised how many commits in OSS comes from paid workers of the various cloud companies and tech companies out there. And I think the value that various cloud companies and tech companies derive from open source by far exceeds their contributions to it. When you add in the economic contribution, those OSS value-adds are an order of magnitude higher. According this Harvard paper [1], the cost to create wide used open-source software once is about $4 Billion. The replacement value to firms that use OSS, if they had to build or buy the equivalents themselves, is about $8.8 Trillion. The Software spending effect (how much firms would need to spend on software without OSS) is 3.5x. According to this EU study [2], EU companies invested about €1B in OSS in 2018, but in return the impact on the European economy was estimated €65B–€95B. [1] https://www.hbs.edu/faculty/Pages/item.aspx?num=65230 https://www.hbs.edu/faculty/Pages/item.aspx?num=65230 [2] https://opencommons.org/images/c/c1/The_impact_of_open_source_software_and_hardware_on-KK0421081ENN.pdf https://opencommons.org/images/c/c1/The_impact_of_open_sourc...
    - firesteelrain 5mo ago
      Understand the argument. No one is forcing anyone to make OSS. They do it because they want to. It’s like they are own worst enemy
      - 5mo ago
tcp_handshaker 5mo ago
I lost my sympathy for many of the open source projects philosophy, the first time I sent a patch to Redis, one of the committers took as its own, never replying to my messages, and patched it in its name. They deserve Valkey. And I still remember JBoss and ahole Marc Fleury ...
paulddraper 5mo ago
You’re reading “cloned and monetized” as “forked.” But in context, it means “cloned/downloaded and offered as a hosted service.” The fork came later, after the defensive license, which was in response to the clone+monetized hosting, eg ElasticSearch.
hedora 5mo ago
First amazon was abusive. They abused their monopoly position to gain market dominance over upstream and didn’t contribute back monetarily or with code. Next, upstream responded with a license change, then amazon escalated with the fork.
silverwind 5mo ago
All those forks turned out to be inferior projects with substantially less contributions than the originals.
ccorcos 4mo ago
While I'm a big fan of open source, I don't understand what the alternative is for this dilemma... Is it supposed to be illegal for me to create my own homegrown database with the same API as MongoDB? If not, then when people start using it, can I offer a hosting solution? I feel like that should be allowed. It's just not always a happy outcome for everyone...
neves 4mo ago
As an user, this is what really annoys me: Crazy sneaky complex billing in which they hit you for data movement within their own systems, double billing you and sometimes triple billing you. Billing footguns and traps are everywhere - you must be a deep expert to avoid them. IAM - the hideously complex auth and access rules system - this was invented by Lucifer sitting on his burning throne in the ninth level of Hell as the worst possible torment for those who have been sent below for using AWS.

by tedivm 5mo ago

deleted 5mo ago

[deleted]

hankerapp 5mo ago

A lot of these projects work on a business model where they open-source their core product, and provide advanced services, installation, maintenance or fully-managed services around their product. AWS was bypassing them by providing fully-managed services. On this, I am on the side of the people behind the projects. Basically AWS was eating their lunch. They had no choice but to change the licenses.

rpdillon 5mo ago
They have a problem with their business model, then. License changes to a formerly open source project are costly. The community reacts very strongly when license terms change after they've come to depend on a product, and they should. Why do we apply this standard to MongoDB but not to Apache, Linux, Postgres, or MariaDB? One purpose of an open source license is to allow many providers to provide the service. As I've talked about here previously, Elasticsearch wasn't able to provide the service I needed, so I had to move to AWS. It's weird to me that the Hacker News community doesn't think that sort of competition is good. The narrative seems to be that all these businesses are somehow victims of AWS, when it seems the truth is much more straightforward: they provided open source software and people used it. The fact that their business had no working plan to actually monetize that foundation should not be taken out on the community.
- cyanydeez 5mo ago
  Walmart pulling up top a small town, opening a single business, paying everyone minimum wage is not 'competition is good'. Just try a little bit of understanding.
  - tonyedgecombe 5mo ago
    Maybe it is for the consumer. When Aldi opened in my nearest town my food bill dropped by 20%.
    - gobdovan 5mo ago
      That's the desired outcome of competition but the effects can go all over the place and the second-order effects in fragile towns can matter more than the price drop. As an extreme example, some people may lose their jobs, local spending may fall, some small shops may close and Aldi may pull out too, so everybody loses (here's [0] as an approximate example). Usually a community can tolerate changes only when it's not already near the bottom. When you're near the bottom, almost any destabilisation can kill your little system. [0] https://www.fox32chicago.com/news/aldi-closes-west-pullman-chicago https://www.fox32chicago.com/news/aldi-closes-west-pullman-c...
    - cyanydeez 5mo ago
      Aldi is a grwat example of a socially discipled capitalism.
      - throwaway2037 5mo ago
        Can you explain you intent behind "socially" in your comment? I don't understand it.
  - surajrmal 5mo ago
    Arguably the town is at fault for choosing to permit Walmart to open in their town in that analogy. If you want to control the negative externalities of capitalism you can't just expect to not provide regulations and hope things will work out. Even if it weren't AWS, someone else with enough determination could use the same open source code to create a compelling alternative taking away business from the original authors. Trying to use social norms to make people not do that is not effective. You need mechanisms that can be enforced via legal procedures to be effective.
skywhopper 5mo ago
Just because they picked a bad business model doesn’t mean they deserve to avoid competition. Don’t give away your source code if you don’t want someone else to provide hosting.
- harrall 5mo ago
  You’re not wrong but if people didn’t, all our companies would be using Oracle and Microsoft SQL Server and paying Larry Ellison instead today.
  - mpyne 5mo ago
    PostgreSQL is doing fine even with AWS having a multitude of hosted offerings. Maybe the business model / community-governance model does matter after all...
    - petepete 5mo ago
      PostgreSQL doesn't have a pro/officially supported version though.
      - mpyne 5mo ago
        Sure they do. AWS RDS, Azure Database for PostgreSQL, etc. are all "pro" / "officially supported" deployments of PostgreSQL. On top of that the PostgreSQL official website even lists a whole table full of vendors from whom you can get commercial support at https://www.postgresql.org/support/professional_support/northamerica/ https://www.postgresql.org/support/professional_support/nort... Bringing faux open source into the world isn't a justification for adopting an infeasible business model and then complaining that your business doesn't compete very well.
        hunterpayne 5mo ago
        Enjoy all new OpenSource projects being open in name only then.
mpyne 5mo ago
> They had no choice but to change the licenses. Then why did they advertise themselves as open-source efforts when they weren't? They should have been the best possible providers of managed service offerings given they wrote the software they'd be managing, no? Why are monopolies OK here but not elsewhere? Choosing a hard-to-win business model is not supposed to be a choice that guarantees you business income.
- streetfighter64 5mo ago
  I've got a field of strawberries, and I put up a sign, "free to pick by yourself, or pay 10$ for a pre-picked basket". Then Amazon comes in, starts sending their workers to pick my strawberries, and sell them for 5$ a basket. Was I then lying when I advertised the strawberries as free in my original sign, if I now want to change it to stop them from doing that?
  - mpyne 5mo ago
    I'm sorry, but "or pay $10 for a pre-picked basket" is not an open source product, because "free to pick" was the other option for an open source product. "free to pick by yourself" is the equivalent a proprietary freeware product, not an open-source product, because it excludes the idea of others picking strawberries. If that's your thing then by all means license it as such. But call it proprietary rather than open source. Some companies make a living off a model of "free to pick as needed for as long as you agree to help tend the future strawberries held in common, even if your competitors pick strawberries. Or you can pay $10 for your own exclusive plot of land and no requirement to let others past your fence". But that's not the model Redis was trying to use.
    - streetfighter64 4mo ago
      You're really torturing the analogy in a way that isn't comprehensible at all. But if your point is that "open source" is a bad license that most people who use it come to regret later, then yes, I agree, and they probably shouldn't have advertised as open source from the beginning.
- 5mo ago
colechristensen 5mo ago
A lot of these projects started as community driven and funded open source efforts that eventually the creators decided to make a professional services company as a sponsor -> that company takes over nearly all of the development -> they relicense when they realize the funding they raised isn't going to be paid back. They're all just rug pulls when the creators want to get rich off of their open product and realize they can't after raising tens of millions. I'd have a lot more sympathy if the story wasn't "closing an open project so we can pay investors"
0123456789ABCDE 5mo ago
isn't it that a lot of these projects start as open-source, then try to bank on that free labor, by switching licenses?

ceejayoz 5mo ago

> it's really weird to say that the forks "resulted" in the license changes when those forks where a response to the license changes But those license changes were a response to how AWS was monetizing their work in ways unsustainable for the upstream projects.

jgalt212 5mo ago
Yes, this was my impression as well.
embedding-shape 5mo ago
> But those license changes were a response to how AWS was monetizing their work in ways unsustainable for the upstream projects Or seen from the other side, these projects chose initial licenses that didn't fit with their wants for how others should use their project, in this mind. If you use a license that gives people the freedom to host your project as a service and make money that way, without paying you, and your goal was to make money that specific way, it kind of feels like you chose the wrong license here. What was unsustainable (considering this perspective) was less that outside actors did what they were allowed to do, and more that they chose a license that was incompatible with their actual goals.
- ceejayoz 5mo ago
  The situation changed. A license that's the right choice at one point may not be the right license a decade later.
  - embedding-shape 5mo ago
    Agree, as long as existing contributors agree the license should be changed, projects should feel free to do so, no harm, no foul.
  - ncruces 5mo ago
    That's fair, but forking the FOSS version is also an adequate response.

stavros 5mo ago

Of course AWS didn't create the forks until the projects changed their license to disallow AWS from making money from their code! That's the whole point here.

jasonlotito 5mo ago
When they changed their license, they were no longer open source. They could have chosen open source licenses such as the AGPL, but they did not. They were a non-open source company at that point, and AWS was putting out a product build on open source. Simple as that. Redis was not an open source company when AWS moved to Valkey. Companies are free to license under the AGPL if they want. Or other open source licenses. Sorry, but non-open source companies aren't getting sympathy from me because they are hating on open source projects.
- stavros 5mo ago
  These were open source projects that had to change licenses away from open source because of AWS. I'm not sure how the OSS companies are the bad guy here.
  - sokoloff 5mo ago
    I think there's plenty of room for people to object to the "had to change licenses" framing. They chose to change licenses, same as they chose the original license. That original license probably helped them with goodwill and to gain a community; when those benefits no longer exceeded the downsides of using that license, they changed licenses to one that suited them better. Naturally, this change costs them some amount of goodwill, a portion of the very goodwill that they harvested by choosing an open-source license in the first place.
    - stavros 5mo ago
      I don't see this as an issue with the company. They were happy to release their code as OSS, as long as that allowed them to make enough money to develop the software. It was a win/win, and them AWS came and took advantage of that. If you leave some apples at the side of the road, with a sign "$1 per apple" or whatever, and people largely pay enough for you to continue to pick apples, that's great. If someone starts coming every day and taking the entire crate, I don't blame you for discontinuing the convenient apple sales, I blame the thief.

2ndorderthought 5mo ago

Sometimes I wonder how much it would hurt Amazon to pay the creators and maintainers of OSS software they sell 1 cent per billing period of use(1 hr?). I also wonder how much money that would offer an oss team. To contribute risk free to improving the product

richwater 5mo ago
I think you would be surprised how many commits in OSS comes from paid workers of the various cloud companies and tech companies out there.
- ninjagoo 5mo ago
  > I think you would be surprised how many commits in OSS comes from paid workers of the various cloud companies and tech companies out there. And I think the value that various cloud companies and tech companies derive from open source by far exceeds their contributions to it. When you add in the economic contribution, those OSS value-adds are an order of magnitude higher. According this Harvard paper [1], the cost to create wide used open-source software once is about $4 Billion. The replacement value to firms that use OSS, if they had to build or buy the equivalents themselves, is about $8.8 Trillion. The Software spending effect (how much firms would need to spend on software without OSS) is 3.5x. According to this EU study [2], EU companies invested about €1B in OSS in 2018, but in return the impact on the European economy was estimated €65B–€95B. [1] https://www.hbs.edu/faculty/Pages/item.aspx?num=65230 https://www.hbs.edu/faculty/Pages/item.aspx?num=65230 [2] https://opencommons.org/images/c/c1/The_impact_of_open_source_software_and_hardware_on-KK0421081ENN.pdf https://opencommons.org/images/c/c1/The_impact_of_open_sourc...
  - firesteelrain 5mo ago
    Understand the argument. No one is forcing anyone to make OSS. They do it because they want to. It’s like they are own worst enemy
    - 5mo ago

tcp_handshaker 5mo ago

I lost my sympathy for many of the open source projects philosophy, the first time I sent a patch to Redis, one of the committers took as its own, never replying to my messages, and patched it in its name. They deserve Valkey. And I still remember JBoss and ahole Marc Fleury ...

paulddraper 5mo ago

You’re reading “cloned and monetized” as “forked.” But in context, it means “cloned/downloaded and offered as a hosted service.” The fork came later, after the defensive license, which was in response to the clone+monetized hosting, eg ElasticSearch.

hedora 5mo ago

First amazon was abusive. They abused their monopoly position to gain market dominance over upstream and didn’t contribute back monetarily or with code. Next, upstream responded with a license change, then amazon escalated with the fork.

silverwind 5mo ago

All those forks turned out to be inferior projects with substantially less contributions than the originals.

ccorcos 4mo ago

While I'm a big fan of open source, I don't understand what the alternative is for this dilemma... Is it supposed to be illegal for me to create my own homegrown database with the same API as MongoDB? If not, then when people start using it, can I offer a hosting solution? I feel like that should be allowed. It's just not always a happy outcome for everyone...

neves 4mo ago

As an user, this is what really annoys me: Crazy sneaky complex billing in which they hit you for data movement within their own systems, double billing you and sometimes triple billing you. Billing footguns and traps are everywhere - you must be a deep expert to avoid them. IAM - the hideously complex auth and access rules system - this was invented by Lucifer sitting on his burning throne in the ninth level of Hell as the worst possible torment for those who have been sent below for using AWS.