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Comment by diggan | Hacker News Reader

Slightly off-topic, but feel like someone here has the answer so asking anyways.

People keep mentioning that AMP is a "open effort" and "open source" but I've only seen the HTML framework's code, not the caching servers. Supposedly, you are able to run your own AMP Cache server, but there are no examples out in the wild.

I even took to Twitter and asked Paul Bakaus ("Open" Web Developer Advocate at Google) who wrote a blogpost about why AMP Cache is good, but no answer.

Is the AMP really a open project or is that just the HTML Framework and the goal is to lock people into Google's AMP Cache?

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> Is the AMP really a open project or is that just the HTML Framework and the goal is to lock people into Google's AMP Cache?

It's Google. Whenever you ask that question and fail to find proof about openness, it should be fairly safe to assume that it's a lock-in.

The idea/technology is open, so if Twitter or Facebook wanted they could run their own AMP service, so when you click a link on their site it loads the AMP version of the BBC served from their servers. That's still not really open, but this is kind of the purpose of AMP.

> The idea/technology is open

I keep seeing that phrase but then

> so if Twitter or Facebook wanted they could run their own AMP service

seems "idea/technology is open" only applies if you're Twitter or Facebook. How about if I'm just me? I can't run my own AMP cache seemingly...

There is nothing preventing you from doing so.

But there is no reason for you to do so. For Twitter and Facebook it is more interesting since they can serve the cache to their users.

Right, it is documented how to do it, but rarely needed. Cloudflare offers a whitelabeled cache as well.

https://github.com/ampproject/amphtml/blob/master/spec/amp-c...

Yes that's what my last sentence was intended to imply. Open isn't really the right word here.

Google's cache implementation is documented (https://github.com/ampproject/amphtml/blob/master/spec/amp-c... and a few more files in that dir) but not itself open source.

Cloudflare also offers an AMP cache if you'd rather not use Google's.

It's "open" as in "not guarded by patents, you're free to roll your own".

It's "proprietary" as in "it does not make sense to run your own unless you are already a giant, and Google won't let you examine their caching servers".

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