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Comment by SquishyPanda23 | Hacker News Reader

> this big co strategy of "mine. I profit now. everyone who built up this useful thing can suck eggs" really sucks and sucks for the humans and sucks for Open Source.

I think the software community is having an "I never thought the leopards would eat my face" moment.

The community pushed for a long time for licenses that donated labor to corporations because the licenses sounded more "free", and that flattered their politics.

When the corporations actually pick up the value everyone left on the table, the community gets outraged.

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Open source software is something that has no meaningfully similar parallel in any other industry, and that has created untold billions (trillions?) of value across the world while also allowing literally anyone to carve out a piece of that value.

That is special. That is wonderful. It is a place for idealism. And honestly, it's worth getting angry about when people (and companies) don't respect it and improve upon it.

Patents and copyright are the parallels in other industries, although they compensate inventors more. Eventually it all goes into the public domain.

That 'eventually' means several lifetimes in practice so it's effectively non-existant.

But GE isn't paying engineers to put out new lightbulb filament designs to the public (and other companies).

Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft, and many, many other companies are literally building tools for their competitors.

That's so outside the realm of possibility in any other industry that a copyright lawyer (or executive) in any heavily-patented field would laugh you out of their office for suggesting something like that.

This happens all the time across all sorts of industries. Where do you think things like ASTM standards come from? Companies pay people to participate in developing open standards that benefit themselves as well as their competitors.

It’s open source, if you’re mad a company used the software in a way you don’t like, you’re not really getting it.

You are either the one who was in the open source movement, in which case I will hold my silence. Else I will say you do not know that open source was started when on-premise was a thing. How do you know how open source would have started now in the era of cloud?

I have worked on lots of open source software with the full intent of just putting the code out there to allow others to use as they see fit. Even if one person uses it to save them or their business time, it’s achieved its goal.

If other people contribute back, great. If I get credit, great. But those are not the motivations when you put up something like a BSD license. Licenses mean things so you need to choose a restrictive license if you get your feelings hurt when people use your software in a way you don’t like.

Exactly. Don't use an open ended license and then complain about it. If you want to restrict use, then license it appropriately. Very simple and obvious.

Exactly. Don't complain about someone being a jerk to you if you didn't get a restraining order against them. If you want to restrict them interacting with you, get a restraining order. Very simple and obvious.

You’re saying that people should lean entirely on the law. It’s pretty reasonable to have some set of behaviors that you’re willing to legally allow but also will complain about. It’s not like you can carve these things out perfectly. You’re going to either be over-permissive and have some stuff you don’t want happen, or be under-permissive and restrict behaviors you’re fine with.

To say “if you want to restrict use, then license appropriately” is to push heavily towards everyone using more restrictive licenses.

this is not about license . Its about other aspect of oss.

There's a difference between what is legally required and the greater good. Obviously, no one involved in this post is guilty of any literal crime. As you're suggesting, the license is the license.

But OSS is a fragile and wonderful thing, and an entity with the resources and clout of AWS would (at least in my opinion) do well to tend that garden rather than strip it bare.

This isn’t “stripping it bare”. Nothing is being taken away from the author nor is anything preventing the author or original contributors from continuing to work.

That’s the whole point of the license. You’re putting code out there for others to use however they want.

This isn’t even about legal requirement vs intent. If you put up a super permissive license, you are making the intent very clear that people can do whatever they want with it.

The lack of obligation, both legal and societal, of using open source software is what makes it so useful and lets the whole ecosystem flourish.

If your in open source for glory and getting monetary or promotional credit for your work, you’re doing it for the wrong reason.

Think of it this way - often when people become extremely wealthy, they turn to philanthropy. Because they want to give back. If someone becomes ridiculously wealthy and gives nothing back, we as a society tend to think poorly of them. Why? Because they are extremely fortunate and highly successful - and they could so easily help others without any negative impact to themselves. That ease makes us unhappy with them _not_ giving back. Because in their particular circumstance, we generally consider it _right_ to use their resources help others. Not required, but right.

Same thing with a company like Amazon. They are enormously wealthy. So we look poorly on them when they don't give back to those bringing them even more wealth. Because they easily could. Because it wouldn't hurt them at all. Because it is right.

I have accepted your terms and I am using your software in a manner that is compliant with your terms. Yet you are trying to burden me with some extra ethereal terms that you're coming up with after the fact and justifying through weird collectivist statements like "the greater good."

Use an open source license that contains ALL of the terms you want involved. You don't get to back out of the open source deal or heap guilt on others because you have regrets about other people literally complying with your terms.

Part of the evolving legal landscape is narrowing the gap between what is legally required and the greater good. It's not about eliminating the gap but we definitely want to rethink things when it's a gaping fault.

The original tweet (as I understood it) wasn't complaining about this in a legal sense. They know the license allows this. They were complaining from a place of asking for a little respect and acknowledgement.

AWS has appeared to be doing a better job recently (from what I can see) in that regard. It's all around good PR. They lose nothing by thanking the maintainer/community for the work, even though the license doesn't require this. On the other-hand they build good-will.

Given the AWS response linked above, it would appear AWS recognizes this, and so maybe they will better accredit the work.

"They know only the rules of a generation of self-seekers. They have no vision, and when there is no vision the people perish.

The money changers have fled from their high seats in the temple of our civilization. We may now restore that temple to the ancient truths. The measure of the restoration lies in the extent to which we apply social values more noble than mere monetary profit.

Happiness lies not in the mere possession of money; it lies in the joy of achievement, in the thrill of creative effort. The joy and moral stimulation of work no longer must be forgotten in the mad chase of evanescent profits." [1]

[1] https://avalon.law.yale.edu/20th_century/froos1.asp

It's painful to contrast FDR's thoughts on finance with what we heard last night:

> "Okay, first of all, let me answer. What they did is illegal, number one. Also, the numbers are all wrong, with the numbers they released. And just so you understand, when you have a lot of real estate, I have real estate, you know a lot of it. Okay? Right down the road, Doral, big stuff, great stuff. When I decided to run, I’m very underlevered, fortunately, but I’m very underlevered. I have a very, very small percentage of debt compared. In fact, some of it, I did as favors to institutions that wanted to loan me money. $400 million compared to the assets that I have, all of these great properties all over the world, and frankly, The Bank of America building in San Francisco. I don’t love what’s happening to San Francisco. 1290 Avenue of the Americas, one of the biggest office buildings."

[1] https://www.rev.com/transcript-editor/shared/HJCYu2w66p28wT2...

I think that is an unfair comparison. Being articulate does not does not imply any other quality than just being articulate.

Back in the day I thought Obama was amazing. He was articulate and considered in his manner of speech. Then we hearing about the drone strikes with heavy collateral damage. And then Snowden came out and told us how Obama administration had put in place all the necessary infrastructure for a surveillance state. And then he put in place Title XI and kangaroo courts at Universities to completely undermine the core tenet of our legal system "Innocent until proven guilty".

Articulate does not equal morality or justice or fairness. It certainly did not with Obama.

> Obama administration had put in place all the necessary infrastructure for a surveillance state

I do not think that is accurate. The Obama administration sustained the growth from the previous administration. I do wish they had curtailed this growth, but c'est la vie.

That's not the whole picture- the giant surveillance program was never going to be killed.

Just give it different names each time congress finds out- Total Information Awareness, Carnivore (slightly different system, head of same hydra), etc.

I would disagree in the specific case of AWS.

We have not seen such an egregious abuse of open source software with any other company. Most companies that make use of a large amount of opensource actually contribute a fair amount back.

Like hiring on the core developers or making a large amount of code fixes and feature development contributions.

Amazon does neither of these things.

Take a look at any highly successful society or community. There is a large amount of gifting and selfless behavior

No they are not contributing. I was working at a big german car maker for the last 5 years and fighting with them so they would allow the devs to upstream all the patches they made just so we would not need to maintain those patches, so it would be cheaper for them. But after 5 years there was still no process for any dev to do that.

> We have not seen such an egregious abuse of open source software with any other company. Most companies that make use of a large amount of opensource actually contribute a fair amount back.

I don't think your claim about Amazon is true. But even if it is, it's not relevant. None of the OSI licenses require improvements to be contributed back to the original project. The most restrictive of them simply requires improvements to be open to the user.

The intention of open source licenses was never to force those who redistribute the software to improve on it. It was to provide end users with the freedom to be able to do that themselves, by distributing the improvements as well.

It's unfortunate that licenses from a generation ago don't adequately cover all the nuance of cloud computing. But the reality is that open source licenses were never about preventing companies from profiting at the expense of original developers. They were about user freedom. If you're unhappy with the way a company is using the software you open sourced, that is a sign you weren't prepared to commit to what open source means, philosophically.

Something like the AGPL would be preferable, if also more controversial. Then you'd also have a peanut gallery of people telling you your software is "source available" instead of open source.

> The intention of open source licenses was never to force those who redistribute the software to improve on it. It was to provide end users with the freedom to be able to do that themselves, by distributing the improvements as well.

Perhaps that was the intentions of the license creators, but famously Linus for example chose the GPL license precisely as a quid pro quo - I give you code for free, you give me back code for free.

And this projects doesn't use GPL, uses Apache. So why do the authors expect something back !?

What about Intel using Minix and not giving attribution to Tanenbaum?

And companies still get chastized constantly on HN for not being free enough. Open core? Not free enough. Common clause? Not free enough. I've been seeing it here for years.

You misunderstand what happened. Some open source software still had more restrictive licensing, but most corporations opted not to use it, often because they simply couldn't and still operate legally, and thus, the software was less supported and less used software died out.

When companies couldn't find free software to use, they just wrote it themselves, typically, unless it was something big and way outside their domain.

Rather than being beholden to a licensing agreement, it would be nice if OSS had a license for an "enterprise-level donation" that was mandatory for for-profit use. It would be a one-time cost, so it would be easier to push through the accountants at lots of big companies, and companies could feel free to use the software at their leisure. Authors/contributors could choose to charge another fee for upgrading to a new major version, opt to end support of an old version or not and so on and so forth.

The best strategy for OSS is to use copyleft licenses or EPL.

Everyone hates capitalism particularly when they fail to capitalize on it.

That’s fantastic. Did you come up with that?

Bravo, that’s more or less the TL;DR of all BSD, GPL/Apache endless flame.

I love how these reckonings and syntheses are coming.

Sadly, every generation has to re-learn that the scorpion can’t help itself from stinging.

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