Hacker News Reader

Comment by talawahdotnet | Hacker News Reader

I really hope not, the fact that all of these services are based on OSS software is what will help keep Amazon in check as they grow, because at the end of the day if AWS starts to turn into Oracle and get abusive with their pricing/licensing then the customer has a lot more leverage to move to another cloud or self host.

To me, the fact that AWS is basing all their services OSS is a good thing for consumers. The thought of it all being proprietary is what would scare me.

View on HN

If they aren’t open sourcing the innovations they make on top of open source software, then it is proprietary software.

I think amazon are unlikely to give up any competitive advantage they are not forced to give up.

> If they aren’t open sourcing the innovations they make on top of open source software

I'm not sure I'm reading your statement correctly, but it sounds like you're saying that anything not developed under a copyleft license is proprietary.

If it was important for authors to receive contributions from derivative works, why would they have selected a license that doesn't require that?

I don’t see how you interpreted it that way - anything released with a proprietary license, or closed source and not released at all, is proprietary. The fact that it’s derivative of an MIT or similarly licensed work makes no difference.

Yes, sorry, I thought you were giving it a normative interpretation, but you were just stating a fact.

I agree that your statement is correct.

The innovations Amazon ads are useless outside of Amazon. Everything is about scaling open source systems inside of the Amazon ecosystem. It's not going to be usable or useful anywhere else.

That’s difficult to discuss without knowing the details, but it’s hard to believe that there isn’t anything that is of use to someone outside of amazon, even other cloud providers. There must be some efficiency gains somewhere that would benefit the original software.

Maybe minimal benefits to other cloud providers, but hardly something you'd need in the core library. I think Amazon should contribute more to open source, but I certainly wouldn't think any company should release something that would only benefit it's competitors.

It is essentially a case of letter vs spirit - using it unmodified doesn't require a contribution. I never got hired by Amazon but I believe their work is technically schema and configuration. No license I am aware of calls for such radical transparency.

Good luck self-hosting DynamoDB and your AWS Lambdas...

There are DynamoDB Local[1] and AWS SAM CLI[2], both from AWS, which allow you to self-host DynamoDB and AWS Lambda functions. ;)

That said, I agree with your argument, but found it rather funny that you just picked two AWS services you can indeed run locally.

[1]: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/amazondynamodb/latest/developerg...

[2]: https://github.com/awslabs/aws-sam-cli/

These are meant for anything more than dev testing though. All the big clouds offer various dev/local versions of their hosted products that are usually just wrappers around sqlite or rocksdb to emulate the interfaces.

DynamoDB is really only good for testing since it uses SQLite underneath.

All the more reason for an AWS managed version of MongoDB and Knative...

The only reason that's never going to happen is because Mongo's licensing prevents it.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com