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Comment by okram | Hacker News Reader

The third wave of open source software is no software at all. It is only a matter of time before Amazon doesn't care whether it's licensed Apache2 or not. They will just take software and sell it. You have a problem with that? Have fun suing them... Year 1..2..3..oooo. you are quite the fish..4..5. broke. Out of money.

Tech is dead.

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Initially, licence the software as AGPLv3. Then, if necessary, assign copyright to someone like the FSF or the Software Freedom Conservancy who has the goodwill to attract sponsors to keep up a suit for as long as necessary.

Ha. The two comments that critique Amazon got down voted with negative points. Does Amazon have cronies patrolling Hacker News to squash dissidents?

Me too I realized that criticism towards AWS brings downvotes on HN. A bit strange because it's usually the opposite online. Maybe a lot of HN readers are working for AWS.

You must be referring to the "love-hate" relationship between Amazon and open source software as described eg here?

https://www.zdnet.com/article/amazon-and-commercial-open-sou...

"Vendors developing those open source products started accusing AWS of strip mining, i.e., reaping the benefits of the products, without contributing back to their development."

I hate to defend Amazon, but it seems that they do contribute back to open source:

https://aws.amazon.com/opensource/

For example running `git shortlog -ne` in the Linux kernel git repository will show a number of Amazon folks with many commits to their name.

Linux contributions are not the best example, since it's GPL, and you pretty much have to contribute back to get your changes mainlined, and end-users can request your changes at any time.

Now, if they contributed back to FreeBSD, that would be meaningful, since they don't have to.

Amazon doesn't distribute Linux on server hardware (just consumer hardware like the Kindle) so they don't have to give back for server aspects of Linux like KVM, yet in the Linux kernel code, the Amazon employees are mostly submitting patches for things like KVM, not for Kindle hardware support.

It would surprise me if Amazon use FreeBSD, I thought they use Xen & Linux KVM exclusively?

Disclosure: I work for AWS.

See https://twitter.com/cperciva/status/1211125881264934917 for one example of working with FreeBSD.

  It's truly awesome that I can send an email to Amazon 
  saying "we're seeing an odd performance issue here" and
  get back "here's a FreeBSD kernel patch I just wrote which
  provides a 10% performance boost".
  
  And people claim that Amazon never contributes back to
  open source...

I linked the patches here. Not all of the work is from an AWS engineer: https://twitter.com/_msw_/status/1220088310443307008

  https://reviews.freebsd.org/D23322
  https://reviews.freebsd.org/D23323
  https://reviews.freebsd.org/D23324
  https://reviews.freebsd.org/D23325

Those are not the same open source projects.

When Amazon strip mines and destroys some projects, I don't think that's any better just because they need and do changes in the kernel

Do you have any examples of projects destroyed by Amazon? Or a definition of what you mean by "strip mine"?

"strip mine" is in the zdnet article linked above, have a look. (Resells without contributing back in any meaningful way, instead hurting the oss company financially).

"Destroyed" was an exaggeration, at least as of today.

However I like and use some of the oss projects Amazon strip mines -- if Amazon instead paid the oss companies a part of want Amazon makes, that'd let those oss projects hire more people, improve the software even more -- and that I would appreciate, and could be made in a mutually beneficial way I think.

This isn't a new problem, for eg web hosting companies have been selling Apache/PHP hosting for decades. Apache and PHP were made more useful because of that reselling rather than being negatively affected by it. I think the only difference now is these OSS companies are VC backed so they have to get huge growth to pay back their giant loans.

I watched a talk recently that argued that Amazon increases the size of the market available for the software the OSS companies are producing. So the pie increases in size and the result is likely to be more money available for the software, not less.

The OSS companies you refer to are more about using OSS as the new shareware, a loss leader or poison pill to sell proprietary software, their business model isn't about open source at all.

> 'the only difference now is these OSS companies are VC backed so they have to get huge growth'

That's a good point.

> their business model isn't about open source at all.

(What do you consider open source biz models?)

> OSS as the new shareware

I think I understand what you mean. At the same time, in my case using only the OSS parts of the open core software, has been more than what I've needed

> I watched a talk recently

That talk sounds interesting, ... If you remember the name or speaker maybe I can find it?

> What do you consider open source biz models?

Something that doesn't involve proprietary software, so support or pure-OSS SaaSS. Like RedHat.

> If you remember the name or speaker maybe I can find it?

I think it may have been one by either NextCloud or RedHat, I'll try to find it.

It wasn't the talk I was thinking of, but this NextCloud talk discusses various OSS business models and mentions the AWS vs VC-OSS issue, especially during the questions section.

https://fosdem.org/2020/schedule/event/gpl_and_business/

Thanks, I'll have a look, sorry for the late reply

Another talk by NextCloud, also not the one I was thinking of:

https://media.libreplanet.org/u/libreplanet/m/why-i-forked-m...

Thanks

Have they contributed to MySQL/MariaDB or to Postgres?

The Postgres git repo doesn't make it easy to discover the employer of the commit authors, but yes, they do send patches to Postgres, here is a search of commits referencing mailing list discussions started by Amazon, plus a couple of examples of where they sent patches:

https://git.postgresql.org/gitweb/?p=postgresql.git&a=search... https://www.postgresql.org/message-id/92F458A2-6459-44B8-A7F... https://www.postgresql.org/message-id/9EF7EBE4-720D-4CF1-9D0...

If that was the case, would they have to be many, or just one with a script and a catchall mailbox ?

They are probably using some free OSS script.

You posted a borderline incoherent rant of nonsense, what did you expect?

Some open-source projects have companies behind them - e.g. I am the founder of RudderStack, an open-source segment.

We have thought about this quite a bit. The way to address this is to make offering your OSS as-a-service from day-1. Initially, you are small and AWS won't care. Once you become big, you should be able to compete with AWS on the service offering - afterall you know your code best.

The problem arises when the OSS vendors had a different business model (open-source, on-prem support only) and AWS is able to completely own the as-a-service market.

I'm probably naive but I don't think you need that much money to sue AWS. They may afford an army of lawyers, but that's their problem. You can't buy a judge as far as I know.

The ElasticSearch lawsuit is still ongoing. 5 years later. They are "quite the fish."

What lawsuit is this? The only one I can find is from September 2019, https://www.elastic.co/blog/dear-search-guard-users https://www.elastic.co/blog/dear-search-guard-users-includin...

No. This will happen, but the real third wave is open source going out of the clouds and into Kubernetes.

I actually expect Kubernetes to start offering the AWS services as CRD/operators, and not the other way around.

cloud is dead.

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