Hacker News Reader

Comment by thatguyagain | Hacker News Reader

Are people really expecting the devs at AWS to give a "thank you" to every third party developer out there who's code they use? This is just ridiculous. When does this become an obligation? Is there an unwritten rule of how large/successful a team has to be before they need to give thank's like this?

View on HN

I don't think you need to give a "thank you" in the announcement to every library you use, but if you have a product that's just a fork of an open source project, then, yes, I definitely think you should thank them in the announcement.

No, but they do it typically: "Announcing AWS X, our implementation of {open source project}" (they do this with MongoDB, ActiveMQ, etc). The product mentioned here is more than just a managed version of the open source project; it is a major component however. (good example is Redshift, though when they announced it they barely mentioned the role Postgresql plays in that to be honest)

https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/amazon-redshift-the-new-aws...

Import to realise that the DocumentDB (Amazon's MongoDB emulation) is not based on the MongoDB code base.

The code may not be based on their code, but I don't see how you can have an emulation of X that isn't based on X. Imitation may be the sincerest form of flattery, but there's nothing stopping them from including some of the other forms. Plus a little gratitude, maybe.

Arent Google and Oracle fighting the emulation X not based on X right now? (where X is Java API)

Every talk AWS does about Redshift they mention that it’s based on Postgres. They tell you to download a Postgres driver to connect to it with any language besides Java for which a JDBC driver is provided.

Well ... they tell you that not because they're bending over backwards to give postgres credit. They're doing it to tell you that the barrier of entry to this database is nearly 0 if you are already using Postgres.

You haven’t watch the reInvent talks have you?

But if you try to use the same schema design from a standard Postgres database and use the same query patterns, you will be sorely disappointed. Redshift uses a columnar store and is an OLAP database as opposed to Postgres which is a traditional database.

You can implement a columnar store in Postgres. (Of course there's more to Redshift than that)

https://github.com/citusdata/cstore_fdw

No I totally get that. It is designed for data warehousing workloads rather than transactional. I'm saying that I have seen it more as a feature of "you use your existing tools and drivers" since it speaks the postgres wire protocol.

I agree, but I was trying to be apples to apples and compare launch announcements, and when Redshift was announced, the discussion of Postgres was quite muted (admittedly several years ago, so their messaging may have shifted over time)

There's a pretty bright line between "code they use" and "project they fork".

"thank you" is a pretty low price for software.

I think thatguyagain is making a good point about infinite regress. Should we all add a thank you to our github pages, thanking every dependency, library, framework, to Stroustrup, to Stallman, to Linus, and to John von Neumann?

I’m with you on that one, but if you are literally just forking a package, rather than depending on a package, and rebranding it into your ecosystem, then a big “thank you for making this and making it open source” is appropriate.

> then a big “thank you for making this and making it open source” is appropriate.

As is not doing it.

Perhaps you did not mean to use the word "appropriate"?

I do tend to mention the major projects I build on in my credits, as well as actually respecting attribution licenses when I make my little forks. The effort is minimal, it's all good karma. If everyone did this, we'd probably have fewer "openssl" or "pgp" situations, as the people doing the work would get actual visibility through the chain.

Yes there needs to be a blockchain named gratitude; the shoulders of giants

>Should we all add a thank you to our github pages, thanking every dependency, library, framework, to Stroustrup, to Stallman, to Linus, and to John von Neumann?

Did you copy their inventions 1:1 and rebranded them as your own? No you didn't. You just used them which is different.

If your understanding of somebody leads you to obvious absurdity, one possibility is they're being absurd. The other is that you misunderstood them. I think it's worth exploring both paths before posting to suggest somebody's a fool.

If someone gave you tens of thousands of dollars of valuables would you say thank you? If people gave that to you regularly would you become too bothered to say thank you? especially when your acknowledgement could help the person giving you their wealth?

In communication circles, people differentiate between requests and demands. The key differentiator: Turning down a request does not lead to anything negative. In particular, the requestor is not displeased or upset. If he/she is, then it was likely a demand disguised as a request.

On the other hand, fulfilling a request can, and often will, lead to a positive. It's still a request.

If you're going to be upset about it, don't phrase it as a request. A big chunk of the population will be annoyed by it.

Soapbox aside, getting to your comment: If someone is giving me that money unsolicited, I may or may not give a thank you. Context is extremely relevant. I did not give a "Thank you" to the recent stimulus check, for example. And I've definitely had fights with people voluntarily giving me stuff over and over and complaining about my not saying "thank you" (or even worse, not reciprocating). I've had to forbid them from giving me gifts in the future. I'm not saying my attitude is the norm, but it is "one of the norms".

The book Influence covers this topic in a lot of detail, and this is commonly discussed in Negotiations books. The bottom line: Be wary of gifts, and either reject if you suspect reciprocation is desired (which could mean "Thank you"), or make the understanding explicit and keep the reciprocity in mind. Of course, this goes at odds with several cultures.

As much as we like to talk about "open source" culture, it doesn't exist. It gets argued to death every time it comes up, which is a good sign it doesn't exist. A big chunk of the SW world, if not the majority, do not feel a need to reciprocate - even with a thank you. (Most of that chunk are OK giving a "Thank you", and this is not a contradiction).

not sure why you've been down-voted but I thought that was well explained. I do rather strongly disagree with your example as being relevant, but I think you've made a lot of good, relevant points. Your example of stimulus being a gift is incorrect. We explicitly pay into social programs as a society with full expectation that those funds will be used to help us. Stimulus isn't a gift.

Well since they save a tremendous amount of time and effort by incorporating code that other developers spend their time on it the least they could do. Heck, it's even possible to mostly automate this as a lot of companies already (automatically) check for licences that require attribution or have other conflicts before you release your product.

Eh yes. Even my TV has an open source acknowledgements section in the menu.

As does this - that's what the NOTICES file is for. When I've looked at it on TVs it looks the same: Copyright notice and license terms that they're required to bundle with any redistribution.

We got a new oven last year and it came with a sheet of paper acknowledging all the open source software it used.

I'm really curious what open source software an oven uses? I would think all it needs is timers and a temperature monitoring loop.

I didn't keep the sheet, the only one I remember is FreeType which must be for the digital display.

Actually yes, we do. And I don't think this is excessively onerous. While not a legal requirement, it is a legitimate expectation, like having your "Good Morning" returned by someone, and we feel sad when this does not happen.

RedHat gave stock options to F/OSS contributors when they IPO'ed.

...yes? This is an automatable process these days, AWS / Amazon certainly have the resources to do it, and under many OSS licences it's a legal obligation to give attribution.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com