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Comment by curiousgal | Hacker News Reader

> Not necessary as per the APLv2 license

The conversation ends there, doesn't it?

Not really. The conversation goes on as long as we like. Part of OSS is about trust and reputation. AWS could have really helped the maintainer with a single sentence and they didn't.

It's like not saying thanks to the barista when you get your coffee. Not the end of the world, but it's still a touch rude.

> AWS could have really helped the maintainer with a single sentence and they didn't.

It's not befitting a large enterprise like AWS to tell their prospective customers that they are just wrapping their infra around free software in their marketing copy. If that single sentence even slightly impresses upon .1% of their potential customers that they ought to spin it up on their own infrastructure, obviating their need to pay for the service, that's plenty of disincentive to add the message.

That’s not as clear cut as your post may make it seem. Some users (me, for example) are more inclined to use a hosted service of some open source software than of some proprietary piece. Because that gives me a migration option if the providers service no longer fits my needs. For example, I’m paying four digits a month for some hosted Postgres database.

Misses the point. The marketing copy there is to bamboozle the uninformed into opening their wallets. If you are better informed, you already know that AWS plagiars pretty much all it's services from open-source. A smaller player catering to a tech audience might add open source to its bullet points as some sort of virtue signalling, but that's no benefit to the established megalith that is AWS.

Amazon's entire cloud business revolves around providing managed infrastructure as an alternative to self hosted solutions, so I don't think that is really a secret regardless.

Also, consider that they rely on having a positive reputation to attract engineering talent and also to continue to get third party developers to release their infrastructural code under permissive licenses.

>Part of OSS is about trust and reputation.

If trust and reputation were enough, we would not need licenses. The GPL is great and had the impact it did exactly because it forced people to do things.

When you are a huge company you have to be careful about saying thanks to Barista.

Maybe the developers would like to say thanks to barista but lawyers said to the developers to not talk to the barista no matter what since it's safer to say nothing than risk saying something wrong.

The model where company makes money off of someone else's work without paying them should be illegal. Currently you cannot hire someone as an apprentice and don't pay them - you need to give at least the minimum wage. OSS is sort of a loophole where companies can obtain work without payment. I think this practice should be illegal and regardless of the license company adopting OSS solution should pay its contributors market rates - that is the amount of money it would take AWS to pay to create such product.

I appreciate the underlying sentiment, but I disagree. When I contribute to OSS it's my choice to and I want the right to let anyone do whatever they want with code even if I never exercise that right.

Personally, I think OSS licences should be changed to prohibit unpaid use by any entity that has a single stakeholder worth more than a billion dollars. That way the startups and medium sized businesses around the world can benefit and the tech lottery winners pay something reasonable ($1m a year, say) to support OSS.

There is the same argument that people who want apprenticeship use. They want to work for a company and learn, but company won't hire them because they don't have money to pay for "idle" worker and the overhead to teach them. But this is for the greater good. In the past you had companies who used their market share in particular city to drive wages down and people had a choice either work for them and starve or move to different city. Minimum wage stops this, at a cost of some people being unable to work for free. I can accept that.

There will be projects for sure that would love their software were used by AWS and other companies without paying them, but that will only create a race to the bottom. We should stop exploitation of engineers by these giant companies.

> The model where company makes money off of someone else's work without paying them should be illegal.

So, once an author is dead, it should be illegal to sell anything they created? Or should ownership rights in content for the estate last forever?

Your idea is terrible when examined in detail.

This is an edge case, but for sure they would have family members who would inherit the titles and in an event of absence of such people then the state should take ownership.

Wait, I should be forced to give the state control over my creation, instead of being able to make it free to everyone, forever? Monstrous.

You want to make permissive licenses illegal or what? That's ridiculous.

Pick something like the MariaDB or CockroachDB license if you don't want Amazon to provide a hosted version of your software.

Yes it should be illegal to use OSS in SaaS platforms without paying the OSS contributors.

Not legally required != shouldn't do it.

You're not legally required to say "Hi" when you run into people you know and making it legally enforceable would be a legal nightmare, but it's the decent thing to do.

Not really, it's about Amazon not being a great OSS citizen. They don't have to be but it's a combination of immature, rude, and unprofessional to not be like that if your core business is packaging up and integrating other people's OSS software.

They are of course well within their rights as per the license to behave like this but there's a notion of being courteous, grateful, and constructive in the OSS world that comes with being a responsible OSS citizen and that goes a long way to ensure people volunteer to help you out with bugs, support, change requests, etc. It doesn't cost anything to just reach out and give this person some kudos. It's the right thing to do.

Amazon is being a bit insensitive here and this sounds to me like somebody up high ought to do a bit of yelling internally about acting professionally and not needlessly burning bridges with the OSS people that they depend on for their core business. At least I'd be all over this if I were confronted with this kind of behavior by one of my colleagues. Not cool. A public apology would go a long way to fixing this; maybe a couple of lines in the readme. Doesn't cost a thing.

Well, the legal one at least. Morals are another thing, but maybe that's not really Amazon's concern.

This is analogous to "hey, fella, I have a First Amendment protects right to be a manipulative, sociopathic liar" - it's true, and it doesn't invalidate people complaining about your behavior.

AWS did something rude, unprofessional, and indicative of bad OSS citizenship. The fact that the lawyers can sign off on it is irrelevant.

However, if a company that uses some OSS stuff is not under a moral obligation to do so? If not so, then why do we do OSS with licenses? Why not just Copyright everything?

Is this a typo and shd ve GPLv2?

https://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0

Thanks. But is this standard to abbreviate to APLv2? I only knew the language APL and the apache license is normally abbreviated apache-v2, or so, isnt it?

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