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Comment by frabert | Hacker News Reader

If you don't like the terms of the license for software you released maybe you should have chosen a different one.

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.

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.

For people there is and its always people who make decisions. Companies are just a legal entity.

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.)

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.

> 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

lol. That's almost certainly not how this worked.

This worked by:

- The PM set some broad brush requirements.

- An engineer saw there was some useful code.

- They/their infrastructure checked that it was under a sensible license.

- They added it

- They released it

- Someone noticed that their product was being used under the license that they had released it under.

- ..

- Big deal?

> An engineer saw there was some useful code.

This is full clone of the original project, not "some code".

Look.. going back up the thread and the tweet.

There has to be daylight between legal "fault" or obligation and courtesy. The author isn't going on a tirade, he made a quip.

We have faculties, as humans, that aren't strictly legible in the way a license or legal code is. Laws are not a substitute for custom or courtesy. We do need both. No one said they stole. They said they were discourteous.

But the author had the opportunity to specify the behaviour that he felt was courteous enough. Some people do not care about shout-outs, and those people do not include attribution clauses in their code licenses.

I also did not mean "fault" in the legal sense, but rather in the sense of courtesy. It is not a faux pas to comply neatly with the terms of a public contract. What you're suggesting is that Amazon erred in not mentioning the author, but the fact that is visible to everyone in the license is that the author does not care about attribution.

I don't like the insinuation that a license can be non-exhaustive in its conditions for the "correct" use of open-source software. You shouldn't run the risk of offending an author by violating some tacit, contradictory rule.

> But the author had the opportunity to specify the behaviour that he felt was courteous enough.

So I'm free to treat you like an absolutely piece of shit, be a raging asshole at you, and you're going to defend my horrendous treatment of you just because legally I'm allowed to and you failed to make a contract with me saying I have to be nice in excruciating detail that's legally enforceable?

Do you also dislike interacting with people, seeing how there's no such thing as an exhaustive list of things to do and not to do?

This is not even an analogy, it's what is being discussed. AWS didn't do anything illegal with regards to their usage of open-source, but we live in a society, and we do have innumerable tacit rules. One of them is that you should give credit to where credit is due.

Software licensing already breaks many tacit rules that people normally take for granted. It's rude to copy someone else's creation without asking first - but if they license their code in a way that allows for copies to be created, it is no longer rude to copy that code without permission.

It is also rude to sell someone else's work without permission. But if they choose a software license without a non-commercial clause, it is no longer rude: and this implies that the absence of a feature in a license is a kind of approval of its opposite.

If you choose a license without an attribution clause in it, you are admitting, publicly, that you do not care about attribution - not that you require, nor that you forbid it, just that you are ambivalent. If somebody goes on to use your code without attribution, you are wrong to then point out that they have been "rude" to you, because you have already declared your indifference.

I'm not suggesting that unwritten rules are bad. I'm suggesting that trying to introduce unwritten rules to a system where written rules (i.e. licenses) already exist is a bad thing. Software licensing already sits at the intersection of legal and social obligations, because attribution is a feature with essentially no legal impact; treating a software license as a social contract is not a mistake.

IDK... lets remember that this is a low stakes game. At worst, someone is now cross with aws product people.

Also, it's not like we're talking about arcane pleasantries that no one could have anticipated. Say JKRR opens Harry Potter, copyleft or something. You record an audio version and sell it with great success. Is it not obviously courteous to mention her in some way?

It's even moreso, if you are aws, and JKR is just a regular author.

It's not like anyone who uses a library is expected to perform a ritual dance. It's common sense basics and if you get it wrong nothing happens. Doesn't seem like a lot to ask.

> so if you want it, stick it in your license

It's a rather pointless burden and not without cost, as it can make it incompatible with other licenses.

It's reasonable to expect some credit to be acknowledged even when it's not mandated by law. Just common courtesy.

That's the way corporations have acted forever.

If attribution is needed, put it in the license.

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.

Oh you have the right to complain, just no legal recourse or entitlement to anything.

> 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.

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.

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.

I agree with you, but Amazon hasn't reached $1.6T market cap by being "nice".

(edit: corrected amount, thx jimhi).

1.6 TRILLION

in USD too.

Next time, slap AGPL. Maybe offer an alternative license to companies for GitHub sponsorship alongside.

I really hate this happens to people. :(

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?

Common courtesy is made of unwritten rules and it does serve a purpose.

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.

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.

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