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Comment by tw04 | Hacker News Reader

I assume Amazon is going to let you run their S3 stack on Microsoft or your own compute? If not, how is it any different?

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S3 is probably the worst possible counter-example given that Amazon hasn't made any moves against S3 being cloned verbatim by their competitors, even though they probably could block them from using the S3 trademark to market their services as "S3 compatible" if they wanted to. They even let you use the official AWS tools and libraries to interface with third party S3 clones. That's about as fair to the competition as it gets.

Nobody is stopping you from cloning windows functionality on something else. You’re free to run samba or WINE all day long.

Let me know when Amazon lets me run THEIR S3 stack on hardware of my choice. Until then, all the downvotes in the world won’t change the fact they’re doing the same thing only worse.

Why would AWS let you run something they don't even sell licenses for? your attempt at an equivalence makes no sense

Exactly. They're even more anti-competitive. At least MS will sell you a Windows license. Amazon will only let you run their software on AWS. Apple will only let you run MacOS on their hardware.

100%. Amazon is the anti-competitive king. They just copy everything thats popular. unfortunately you cant just copy your way to sql server. Apple, Google, they all do the same. Sour grapes the MS does it better.

Note that it's normally legal to use trademarks descriptively as in "S3 compatible" though maybe it would have to be S3™ compatible or S3® compatible to be totally up to scratch. But even then, the reason Intel CPUs have marketing names at all was judges telling them that 386 wasn't a good enough trademark

Not the same in the slightest, this would be like AWS allowing you to run S3 on Azure but charging you 4 times the same licensing cost in Azure as you would pay in AWS.

A cloud having exclusive software and features is expected.

Windows Server isn't a cloud software feature though, so S3 is not a good analog. This is a lot closer to the bundling shenanigans that have repeatedly gotten MS in hot water (Internet Explorer, Teams, etc.)

True, I was mostly trying to tie it into what the OP had said then really a valid example. Maybe should have added "and s3 was software that was generally available outside of the cloud" or something like that.

Mostly trying to point out why S3 is not an example of this.

An OS having exclusive software and features is expected. A vendor dictating what hardware you can run it on is expected.

Why is one a problem and the other isn’t besides the fact that half of HN has an irrational axe to grind anytime they hear Microsoft?

Neither of those things are happening here.

Microsoft is charging higher license costs for Windows server on competing cloud providers (but not all competing providers) than on Azure.

For the exact same software.

This isn’t an axe to grind with Microsoft, it’s clearly anti competitive.

>Microsoft is charging higher license costs for Windows server on competing cloud providers (but not all competing providers) than on Azure.

> A vendor dictating what hardware you can run it on is expected.

Correct, Microsoft is literally dictating what hardware you can run it on, and what it costs to run it on that hardware. Which has been happening for decades. Either you've never dealt with enterprise software, or you're refusing to acknowledge reality. Oracle has been doing this from the beginning of time, they charge a different "per core" price depending on the type of core you choose, to promote the sale of their own hardware.

They extended the same pricing model to cloud. The only reason you're complaining about this is because it's Microsoft.

https://www.oracle.com/contracts/docs/processor-core-factor-...

https://medium.com/@vbalebai/debunking-the-myth-oracle-in-th...

I'm surprised you think that people don't complain about Oracle.

Imagine if Amazon has their own OS or software you could run yourself.

Then imagine that Amazon charges 50 USD/month for the license for this OS/software if you run it on AWS. But if you run it outside of AWS, it would be 200 USD/month.

This is what Microsoft is currently doing.

Yep. It's kosher. If you don't like it, don't use Windows Server.

How much is Microsoft paying you?

So literally what oracle has done for 30 years?

Run it on one type of hardware it costs X per core, run it on something else it costs Y per core.

Now imagine it’s reached such a market dominance that the product you’re attempting to host requires Amazon OS

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