Comment by permille42 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by permille42 | Hacker News Reader

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Post logic: Here is an example of a company taking their software closed sourced after previously being open. Also, AWS.

AWS uses the crud out of open source. They admittedly "steal" it in that they fork it internally, applying patches, add UI, and then sell it. They still depend highly on basically all the open source software in the world.

That Amazon does this is a rallying call for new licensing schemes. Large monopolistic companies such as Amazon need to be legally shut out of this type of abuse of open source software. So long as we go "It's fine. You have to allow this to truly embrace open source" then we will continue to see Amazon try to shut down all "open core companies" that they can by outright stealing their IP.

Open source is not developed primarily by hobbyists or aficionados. Most open source imo comes from closed source projects being open sourced by companies in order to gain free testing, free work ( contributions ), and more market share ( exposure / interest )

Heralding the death of open-source seems like nonsense just to grab attention. I agree that the large companies are trying to crush open-core companies that are small, but it is obvious they are doing this and there will be a backlash from those of us who don't appreciate their meddling.

Let me play devils advocate for a minute. Maybe what Amazon is doing is just fine. If they had to roll all of their services from scratch themselves, they’d be massively more expensive and dramatically less compatible with everything else. The fact that Amazon and many other hosting companies can offer cheap commodity services based on familiar building blocks is a huge benefit to the world enabled by open source. That’s exactly what open source is about, making the world a better place.

I’m not entirely convinced by my own argument, but I’m having trouble seeing the world as on the whole a worse place with AWS in it.

What Amazon is doing is not fine in any way. Having seen their dev process from the inside it is an absolute nightmare. They give zero shits about the wellfare of their devs nor about their contribution to open source.

The only reason they ever release things to open source is to try to get people to use their paid services. Eg: attention. They view open source only as an advertisement and nothing more.

The problem isn't that they use open source. It is that they spend a lot of dev times fixing all the bugs and then don't contribute them back upstream. They have sooo many internal patches that should go back but they go "if we contributed them back people wouldn't use our more reliable paid service based on that".

They are the exact opposite of the healthy hacker mentality that has brought Linux to the state it is today. Fuck Amazon * 100.

The world isn't a better place in any way with them. Their services aren't cheap in any sense.

Also, behind the scenes all those services you think are "ultra stable" are actual unstable and flaky as hell. Ask anyone who has worked at Amazon for more than a year and they'll tell you that it is constantly in pants on fire mode. All engineers are required to be on call because they have that many fires every single fucking day.

Amazon contribute back to open source, both with funding and code. The issue is about (VC) money rather than contributing back.

I worked there. I can assure you that they contribute very very very very little in terms of what they use. They also have very strict gatekeeping about what they allow to become open source. I've seen multiple projects get prevented from going into open source despite their devs requesting it. Fuck Amazon.

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