Comment by rpdillon | Hacker News Reader

Comment by rpdillon | Hacker News Reader

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This feels close to "felony contempt of business model".

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/06/felony-contempt-busine...

We are supportive of 3rd party ink cartridges, and there's little concern for the business model of the printer manufacturers. We instead care about the rights of the folks using the printers.

With Postgres, no one bats an eye that there are thousands of hosting companies providing Postgres as an offering, and they give nothing back to the project. Same with Apache, Nextcloud, Linux, Nginx, Sqlite, and thousands of other pieces of open-source software. Are folks against hosting companies like https://yunohost.org/?

It's only when (1) the software is open-source, and (2) the entity behind it doesn't know how to sustain itself with open-source, that we suddenly change positions and view the project as a victim. This doesn't happen with printers, it doesn't happen with other open source software. I'm not even against a change in the license, but claiming that AWS is evil for doing this doesn't track.

A lot of those projects are not companies selling software. They're effectively public infrastructure projects, often governed by non-profit foundations or community institutions.

Also, many of them predate hyperscalers and developed governance/economic structures that make them harder for AWS to capture or destabilize, whereas AWS free-riding a vendor-controlled project can destroy the economic engine sustaining the project itself.

Quite ironically, the only example from your list that doesn't predate hyperscalers (Nextcloud) is fundamentally a self-hosting/federation product. It exists largely as an alternative to hyperscaler-native platforms, not as a cloud primitive AWS can easily commoditise into its own stack.

So, treating PostgreSQL, Linux, Elasticsearch and Nextcloud as interchangeable "open source projects" ignores the completely different institutional and economic realities behind the projects.

Indeed! I just don't think it's on Amazon to fix those institutional and economic realities when they decide to host a project that people find useful.

It's on Amazon to consider the second-order effects of their actions. They may in some cases be killing the golden goose.

Companies that provide offerings that are open-source, and then later stop offering open-source updates are not a "golden goose". Organizations that produce open-source need to have a funding model that isn't "charging for hosting". Hosting can certainly be part of it, but there also needs to be a larger strategy. Framing those that don't have one as victims of Amazon ignores the company's culpability for offering the product as open-source in the first place.

If printers were free, and ink was free or open, and the printer company said "don't operate a printer leasing business, that's the only thing you can't do", I would side with the printer company.

This ignores the part where the printer company said anyone could use the printers for whatever they wanted.

It's a hypothetical, we don't need that level of complication. And a software company could start with such a license and then that part disappears.

But even if we factor that in, we have to remember it only applies to new models and it's only being added because some megacorporation stepped in, so that's not getting me to change sides.

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