Hacker News Reader

Comment by gonational | Hacker News Reader

Embrace, extend, extinguish, Amazon edition.

In my opinion, this is the inevitable conclusion of Amazon's sudden increase in direct involvement in OSS projects. With cases like elastic search close in the rearview mirror (I know that there were reasons for this, but it was a start), It's hard not to come to this conclusion.

Once the Amazon tentacles have reached down into every major staple of the OSS economy, it's difficult to predict the end result, but one thing is for certain, it will benefit Amazon more than it benefits anyone else, lest Amazon breaks its promise to its shareholders.

Amazon has demonstrated a pattern of controversial vertical integration, by using internal analytics to determine which of their own merchants' products they should undermine. To believe they would not do the same thing in their largest and most important division would require tragic ignorance.

This is all just my opinion

View on HN

Disclosure: I work for Amazon, where I build AWS infrastructure. But these are my own opinions and experiences at work, and I am not speaking for my employer.

"Embrace, extend, extinguish" has never been uttered in any conversation I've been part of at Amazon. It simply is not part of the philosophy, or culture. We obsess about customers, and customers do not like the things that they depend on, like open source software that they've built their business on, to be damaged.

Rather, they want to do more with open source software all the time. And many want to find ways to get off of software that is constraining them, or causing unplanned stress or surprises when their costs suddenly change due to arbitrary license changes.

The promise here is to customers, and customers tell us that community-led open source software development is better for them. And this is no surprise. As a software developer, and a long time FOSS advocate, I believe it too.

By listening attentively to customers, I believe we will continue to build a business that we, and our shareholders, will be proud to be a part of, and will provide long term growth.

With no disrespect to you, this comes across like a pre-canned response from the Amazon Anti-Anti-Trust legal team...

I mean, your second and third paragraph could be the introduction to an internal presentation about "why we at Amazon should embrace, extend, and extinguish OSS". The things you listed are precisely why Amazon would want to destroy OSS, Because OSS is a threat to anyone offering proprietary software, and anyone who has built their empire on OSS will inevitably need to shift to proprietary software to retain relevance in a world where OSS software "eats the world" by, for instance, commoditizing the infrastructure layer...

In other words, just in time for AWS to become less relevant due to the enormous gains in open source infrastructure as a service tools, Amazon will swoop in and help to destroy the most useful parts of the open source economy.

It's easy to look at this with a naïve optimism and think "but these are the exact kinds of things that helped AWS grow to begin with", To which the obvious reply is "yes, at the bottom end, but Amazon has been focused on enterprise more and more over the past five years, and licensing agreements with other big tech companies have changed the offering and the prospects of future offerings". All you have to do is look at YouTube to see another example of this. YouTube built its user base on small contributors, but as soon as it reached a plateau it began to focus on the old guard, main stream media, Hollywood, etc., unfortunately for the little guys. This is the same pattern every company takes once they get big enough to play competitively with the big boys.

This is all, of course, only my opinion.

I take it as no disrespect. I can understand why you would have this point of view. :-)

If you understand why I have this viewpoint, then have I convinced you to have the same viewpoint? Or, have I given away some thing about my internal reasoning mechanics to suggest that I would have erroneously come to my conclusion, perhaps based largely on blind cynicism?

Personally, I try to keep a "curious" outlook, and to regularly try to disprove my beliefs. To me, one way to do this is to listening closely to criticism from viewpoints and perspectives that are different than mine.

Based on my own experiences, including engaging in very helpful dialog with critics so far, I am not convinced that the same kind of anti-FOSS campaigns that we saw, with ample public evidence, from actors like Microsoft and SCO of the past, would be in the interest of Amazon or its customers. It would be the opposite.

But I think it is right, and it should be expected, to continue to scrutinize Amazon, like any other large organization. I try to judge based on actions and evidence, rather than what-if speculation.

> "Embrace, extend, extinguish" has never been uttered in any conversation I've been part of at Amazon.

We are not talking about internal corporate PR. Enron also had great set of values [1] that were preached to the employees. It's about the actions, not the words uttered.

[1] https://hbr.org/2002/07/make-your-values-mean-something

I am not reciting corporate PR. As I said, I'm not speaking for AWS. I only speak for myself, and I'm not saying anything that I don't believe.

You'll find elsewhere in the comments [1] that on actions, not words, I agree with you. "I try to judge based on actions and evidence, rather than what-if speculation."

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26116542

This sounds like it came from the PR department.

But besides that, I don't think Microsoft engineers in their day to day work ever mention embrace, extend, extinguish. Amazon's motive is profit. They're darn good at it too as we've seen. But that's all it is. If in the process they destroy an OSS company, as they've done, they don't care, because now they have their source and no competition.

Which company are you thinking of?

Except that they haven't extinguished anything.

They certainly embrace and extend which is the very nature and purpose of Open Source software.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com