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Comment by scohesc | Hacker News Reader

Maaaan, why in gods name do companies have to keep re-inventing the wheel. There's so many protocols and specifications out there already that they just have to pick one and improve upon it with the goal of making it backwards compatible with "older" versions of the protocol.

Fuck this "all in one ecosystem" mentality. :\

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Are you sure they haven't "just picked one"? Amazon, and AWS in particular, have a long history of not reinventing anything, just packaging an existing open/free thing up and selling access to it.

I suspect the quickest way to find out if this is LoraWAN or Zigbee or Weightless will be to keep an eye on who switches to a Mongo/Redis style "commons clause" of "SSPL" license... ;-)

they picked the easiest open source solution to convert, you can be assured!

Don’t forget to exclude any AGPL choices first.

>> just packaging an existing open/free thing up and selling access to it.

Just like Apple packaging up CPUs and memory chips. I think most people in tech having a hard time to understand that UX is everything. You can take the Athena example of AWS, even though it is just PrestoDB the difference of UX is enormous. A data scientist (end user) cannot download presto compile it, create a EC2 cluster with failover push it there, configure it, performance tune it and keep updating it but she/he can got to AWS console and pull up the Athena interface and type in a query. This is why "just packing" is very important and people are willing to pay for it.

Oh, don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that like it's a bad thing. I'd _much_ rather be able to us their api to Ansible-up or point-n-click a MySQL database in RDS than to only have them offer some proprietary "Amazon Enterprise SQL Server". It's a good thing.

(I do, though, have some sympathy for the problems companies/projects like Mongo and Redis have where Amazon makes all the money off their products without contributing to the development of them. )

It's not as easy as "improving" existing protocols. Look at the ipv4 -> ipv6 mess. And even then ipv6 suffers from issues that are tied to how networks were built, etc. See this great article: https://apenwarr.ca/log/20170810

If I'm building something to give connectivity to dog tags, why not do something simpler?

Because something simple already exists, for this very use-case (and apparently, in the case of LoRa, with better range)?

I'm personally rooting for this to bomb badly.

You're right. It's just the potential rewards of owning an entire protocol are far too great for companies to resist sadly.

I realize protocols and formats are slightly different, but the history of Sony and trying to invent/own formats is really interesting.

https://www.fastcompany.com/1290466/sonys-long-list-format-f...

Are they?

What profit would companies have made if they'd privatized TCP and the internet as we know it never was able to take off?

A world in which you build an extremely valuable network which benefits everyone, is a world where the profit itself is more valuable, the value of anything is higher.

Maybe protocol was too specific of a word. 'Network' or system? Arguably Facebook is an example of this.

Novell?

IPX/SPX, right?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPX/SPX

Um... this is HN. Half the people reading this want to develop their own proprietary protocol for something and become the next billionaire unicorn thingamajig.

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