AWS forked my project and launched it as its own service
twitter.com
twitter.com
AWS uses a lot of open source, and we contribute a lot, both in terms of code (first-party projects like Firecracker and Bottlerocket, but also third-party projects like Redis, GraphQL, Open Telemetry, etc.), testing, credits, foundation support, and more. But open source is ultimately about people and communities, and I personally feel we could have done more to acknowledge the great work Tim and his co-maintainers have done, and try to support their Headless Recorder work. We're talking with Tim now about this.
(While I think we do far better than sometimes acknowledged, we're also always looking to improve, and appreciate all the feedback that helps us toward that goal.)
I do think there's a larger discussion about trillion dollar companies just forking a project and announcing it as a new feature for their platform without even talking to the original creator.
If there's anything to improve, "reach out first" will be a start.
It's open source. You don't have to reach out. There's nothing legally or morally wrong with what you did. But you can do better. A trillion dollar company can do better to act grateful to be in the position that it's in. To be seen as a leader in a space instead of as a consumer of free work.
I know its not required by licensing - but "legal" doesn't always mean "right".
Probably Amazon's legal department doesn't let him say much more, but then his statement sounds unconvincing and doesn't serve the purpose of taking responsibility and assuring the comunity of their good intentions.
I always find these messages weird, because in the end it's one engineer like you and I who looked at some open sourced stuff and decided to use it, and perhaps it didn't really do what they wanted so they forked it, and it ended up being used in whatever product they were working on, and in the grand scheme of things it was not about a big trillion dollar company being evil, it was about how engineers do their work nowadays.
Just don't repeat Microsofts smooth talk, make-your-own and ghost strategy ;-)
It is possibly even worse than just forking.
If it's not in black and white then it's not part of the license. Spirit isn't defined.
To paraphrase Theo de Raadt, if you're not happy for your code to be used in a puppy mulching machine then don't license it under a permissive license.
"At Serge’s trial Kevin Marino, his lawyer, flashed two pages of computer code: the original, with its open-source license on top, and a replica, with the open-source license stripped off and replaced by the Goldman Sachs license." [1]
[1] https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2013/09/michael-lewis-goldma...
I don't understand. Wasn't the project released under a license that explicitly grants anyone the right to freely use it as they see fit?
It goes without saying though that supporting the open source core (and the core developers) would also go a long way.
The long tail of AWS services is a massive waste of time.
Regarding "giving back" by a company like Amazon, we often talk about the problem of open source maintenance being thankless and difficult due to time commitment and lack of compensation, etc. Personally I don't think direct $$ compensation is the answer, but how about a policy that, for example, dedicated X number of developer hours to the main branch? As in, Amazon tasks a few developers to each give 10 hours of time in direct collaboration with the maintainer(s) to perform tasks the maintainers may have in their queue. That way "giving back" for a project you use is specific and alleviats some of the burden of running a project for exactly those projects from which Amazon benefits.
This is something we are very aware of, and discussions about this cross my desk weekly.
One big problem of the many problems I face regarding such proposals is the people who are the best at writing open source who need the money the most are not the people who are good at writing grant proposals and are good at sucking the money out of such funding systems.
Offer him money and do it in public.
The only reason I was ever given was "we use it and think it is great therefore we won't release it." The implication was "If what you wrote was junk we'd let you release it."
Needless to say I never tried to get Amazon to release any of my software during my time there after that, because the response was so poor.
Edit: If Amazon releases my code, I'll be happy to add a tiny credit to Amazon in Notices.Txt and in no other way be thankful to Amazon.
Email me at atwoodm@amazon.com, and tell me what the internal code names for your projects were, and were you were in the org. I'll see what I can do.
- He's not complaining that Amazon forked his code with Apache license. He admits he also uses other open source with permissive licenses
- He just thought it would be nice/courteous/polite/etc if Amazon acknowledge/recognized/credited/mentioned/thanked his original project that they forked from.
The twitter reply of "user facing open source should have been AGPL" and replies in this thread of "you used the wrong license" don't really cover it.
In other words, I'm not aware of a permissive license that's the same as BSD/Apache with the only difference in that also says "use it as you wish but you must mention my name when you're a commercial enterprise making a splashy product announcement".
Thanks for informing us with the clarification. The original tweet was 11:16 UTC. This HN thread was submitted 11:23 UTC. That twitter reply showing the acknowledgement in "NOTICES.txt" was later at 11:54 UTC.
I don't usually read through files like ~/.config/chromium/Default/Extensions/bhdnlmmgiplmbcdmkkdfplenecpegfno/0.0.1_0/NOTICE.txt (though perhaps I should).
Or are you talking about how if you download the Chrome extension and extract it you can see him referenced in NOTICES.txt? https://twitter.com/maxibanki/status/1317071448322789376
Obviously there is no legal requirement, but would it be that hard for Amazon to include a "forked from..." or "built off of...", etc. to the announcement and product pages, if it really is heavily based off of another work?
- I don't want to use restrictive (GPL) license like those business-hating FSF folks–I want people to use my software _freely_
- Hey! A big business used my software in a way that rubs me the wrong way (in this case, without giving prominent enough attribution)! Not nice!
What's not nice about it? You use a permissive license but you're going to get upset if people follow the letter of your license? This doesn't make sense. This might make sense if there were not alternative licenses but there are, and the author chose not to use them. This seems like playing a mind-game. "It's permissive! Use it how you like! (but I'm going to be upset if you don't follow the unwritten attribution guideline I have in my head)." How is it fair to expect other parties to meet your secret expectations?
What did AWS do wrong here? Were they supposed to know this guy's unwritten expectations?
There's a number of things that are strictly speaking legal, but still considered rude. Often, the reputation of a person or business is based at least in part on whether they do the legal bare minimum, or if they hold themselves to some level of higher standard.
I also think there's a difference between attribution because a license requires it (commonly buried several links/pages deep in some obscure "Here's a laundry list of ALL the open source packages we used to build this"), and acknowledging that a _specific_ library powers the core of a new product. I don't know of any license that marks that line.
It is like fair use: They guy that uses google drive to backup youtube in its entirety is not doing anything illegal. He just demonstrates that he cannot deal with freedom.
> What did AWS do wrong here? Were they supposed to know this guy's unwritten expectations?
I suspect you're either autistic or a lawyer being obstinate. Human society is full of unwritten expectations, we learn these quickly as a child or face social consequences. No where in the law is it written that you must say 'please' and 'thank you' but it's also expected and people are less likely to do things for you again if you don't.
So consider this situation now:
_A person (the dev) did something nice for someone else (a trillion dollar company) and they didn't bother to say thank you._
Personally I'd rather have their source be released like AGPL, as that would credit the authors and let me see their changes.
> In other words, I'm not aware of a permissive license that's the same as BSD/Apache with the only difference in that also says "use it as you wish but you must mention my name when you're a commercial enterprise making a splashy product announcement".
Yes. What we need is ABSD, AMIT or AAPL where the first A stands for appreciation / Attribution
> 3. All advertising materials mentioning features or use of this software must display the following acknowledgement: This product includes software developed by the <organization>.
There's a good reason why we no longer use BSD-4 anymore.
https://www.gnu.org/licenses/bsd.html
> The result is a plethora of licenses, requiring a plethora of different sentences. When people put many such programs together in an operating system, the result is a serious problem. Imagine if a software system required 75 different sentences, each one naming a different author or group of authors. To advertise that, you would need a full-page ad. This might seem like extrapolation ad absurdum, but it is actual fact. In a 1997 version of NetBSD, I counted 75 of these sentences. (Fortunately NetBSD has decided to stop adding them, and to remove those it could.)
There is: the four-clause (original) BSD license (https://choosealicense.com/licenses/bsd-4-clause/). Pretty much no one uses it anymore because things quickly get unwieldy if you have to mention ten or twenty projects you used code from in all advertising.
[0] https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/It seems to me it would just require mentioning it in some CREDITS.txt or whatever, which the other lincenses also do.
How is he not complaining. He totally is.
> He's not complaining that Amazon forked his code with Apache license.
The poster was indicating what part of Amazon's behavior he wasn't complaining about, not asserting that he wasn't complaining at all.
That's called the old BSD 4 clause license. Now you know.
In my opinion he is violating the spirit of the open source license since he is using extra-legal means to interefere with amazon exercising their rights under the apache license. This is unethical in my opinion
Somewhat relevant: https://opensource.google/docs/thirdparty/licenses/#wtfpl-no...
That is, how can you know who the copyright holder is if you don't do that?
Considering that not all projects are littered with (c) Stack Overflow User, I may have the wrong idea, but it is definitely something I have seen somewhere. I am not a lawyer, obviously.
Ah yes, this ironclad legalese.
> [...] (reasons)
Well, then why go on something as big and public like Twitter and HN to post about it in the first place? Send a mail to the team of AWS and get in touch. I don't get the point of this tweet, either.
instead of forking they could work with core devs to see if they wanted to support the desired features (potentially with an NDA until release).
this big co strategy of "mine. I profit now. everyone who built up this useful thing can suck eggs" really sucks and sucks for the humans and sucks for Open Source.
I think the software community is having an "I never thought the leopards would eat my face" moment.
The community pushed for a long time for licenses that donated labor to corporations because the licenses sounded more "free", and that flattered their politics.
When the corporations actually pick up the value everyone left on the table, the community gets outraged.
That is special. That is wonderful. It is a place for idealism. And honestly, it's worth getting angry about when people (and companies) don't respect it and improve upon it.
AWS has appeared to be doing a better job recently (from what I can see) in that regard. It's all around good PR. They lose nothing by thanking the maintainer/community for the work, even though the license doesn't require this. On the other-hand they build good-will.
Given the AWS response linked above, it would appear AWS recognizes this, and so maybe they will better accredit the work.
The money changers have fled from their high seats in the temple of our civilization. We may now restore that temple to the ancient truths. The measure of the restoration lies in the extent to which we apply social values more noble than mere monetary profit.
Happiness lies not in the mere possession of money; it lies in the joy of achievement, in the thrill of creative effort. The joy and moral stimulation of work no longer must be forgotten in the mad chase of evanescent profits." [1]
We have not seen such an egregious abuse of open source software with any other company. Most companies that make use of a large amount of opensource actually contribute a fair amount back.
Like hiring on the core developers or making a large amount of code fixes and feature development contributions.
Amazon does neither of these things.
Take a look at any highly successful society or community. There is a large amount of gifting and selfless behavior
When companies couldn't find free software to use, they just wrote it themselves, typically, unless it was something big and way outside their domain.
Rather than being beholden to a licensing agreement, it would be nice if OSS had a license for an "enterprise-level donation" that was mandatory for for-profit use. It would be a one-time cost, so it would be easier to push through the accountants at lots of big companies, and companies could feel free to use the software at their leisure. Authors/contributors could choose to charge another fee for upgrading to a new major version, opt to end support of an old version or not and so on and so forth.
I love how these reckonings and syntheses are coming.
Then use a different license. Hoping that a company like Amazon finds it in their hearts to always do what _you_ consider "the right thing" is just a loser of a strategy. You seem to want all of the good of open source, with none of the downsides. Good luck with that.
Interesting idea for a license.
Everyone can use and modify it, but if a large company with a market cap above $100m or a company wholly funded or owned by such company decides to utilize this project as a for-profit service, then said large company must hire me at for no less than $175,000 in 2020 value.
Sure the author can't require payment after the fact, but there are no open source licenses that prevent the author from soliciting payment from a downstream user. This is all fair game.
>You seem to want all of the good of open source, with none of the downsides.
If you do it right there aren't downsides. As far as business is concerned, the point with choosing any license is to create a win-win situation for all parties involved.
https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2020/10/amazon-cl...
I wonder if FOSS licenses can be modified such that if you are claiming in press that you are "launching" something and it is substantially based on something open source you must state the original authors prominently in body of the press release.
Unlike other types of work, this isn't necessarily true elsewhere (eg in the US & UK), but I understand moral rights originate from France and German and are especially strong there.
(I see that page now mentions "Credits: CloudWatch Synthetics Recorder is based on the Headless recorder. " - is that new? )
Better would be to use mechanisms that already exist to sponsor the core developers for a length of time (Patreon, liberapay, etc). Alternatively, companies like Amazon could create an internal fund that assists key open source projects they've commercialized to set up as non-profits and then makes donations to them over X number of years.
A specific example that comes to mind, one of the main core developers of Webpack (Sean) got hired by Microsoft to essentially just work on Webpack on MSFT paycheck (I think now he branched out a tiny bit into other adjacent areas as well, but he is still one of the main Webpack contributors). I think it worked out great partially because he was not the sole creator, but just one of the few, and he was the only one who went to MSFT, so the other core devs still had some level of control they could exercise on their own without anyone being able to tell them otherwise.
Open source software is more than a license and code. It is a community and the digital public square.
And the Tragedy of the Commons is just as applicable to our public square as it is to William Forster Lloyd's common land.
Either we as a community hold ourselves and others within our community to a higher standard than the text of a license, or licenses will inevitably become increasingly restrictive in the future, to the detriment of all.
Unfortunately, there's absolutely nothing about the OSS community that actually instills this mantra in people. I like to think that I also see OSS as a community and digital public square, but there's no universality to that philosophy.
> Either we as a community hold ourselves and others within our community to a higher standard than the text of a license, or licenses will inevitably become increasingly restrictive in the future, to the detriment of all.
There's just no way that the community will ever do this because there are inherently conflicting incentives to participating in OSS. If you tried to explicitly motivate people to do this, you'd immediately get pushback from the individualistic elements of the community that don't want to participate in something that they feel is politically motivated or that Amazon did nothing wrong.
OSS is a great thing that has tremendously benefited the industry, but the idealism of a community acting together without any consequences or incentives to do so is truly folly. As much as I wish OSS had more of a true community feel to it (and I think there are little pockets where this is tangibly felt), OSS largely exists to provide tools for commercial software development. Those people are out to build businesses and accrue wealth, not fortify the OSS community. I'm sure there are people that actually work to accomplish both, but the vast majority of founders and companies I've worked for in my career don't see OSS as a community. They see it as a giant puzzle box where each piece is an OSS project and their goal is connect pieces together in order to sell a product to somebody. Get acquired/IPO and you've solved the puzzle.
If it were the case that AWS broke some unspoken social convention that is hard to legally enforce, I'd be more sympathetic. But it feels more like the author made a choice to license their software using Apache 2 over other licenses.
If someone doesn't thank you for your "free" services, then keep your head down, plow ahead and take comfort in knowing you're doing a good enough job for a company like Amazon to use your stuff. And if that's not enough, send them a private message and let them know how you feel.
Given that everyone thinks like me, I wonder if some of the "Your license didn't say they couldn't." comments might be a defensive reaction to what they see as an unjustified public shaming. Like an unjustified honk on the road. This is twitter at its best right? Someone says something that pushes the right buttons (intentionally or not), people kick it up a notch by reacting defensively and we're off to the races!
If you don't want it, simply say so! But if you say you don't care... don't complain when people do.
Meanwhile, the open source code I write for my employer is Apache 2.0 licensed because the permissive licenses seem to be the most friendly towards large corporations and hence is what they prefer.
Open source software is more than a license and code.
You may wish to read https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/open-source-misses-the-point .
For me this never ending OSS disagreement is just an excuse to take just benefits of the community but with zero retribution (there is no progress on that).
Someday, people will understand that Software is crafted by humans but not by a bunch of companies or self-thought computers.
I've never found this square.
Corporations does not care about much but shareholders' interests. If you want to change that, you need to come up with a different system than capitalism, which encourages the standards you want to see.
> We'd like to rewrite such features for pgbouncer from the ground up but it is impossible to prove to the lawyer that the re-writing is not kind of "derivative works". I believe it is not what you expected, as an opensource project that derived benefit from the whole pgbouncer community.
“3.3 Use Limitation. The Work and any derivative works thereof only may be used or intended for use with the web services, computing platforms or applications provided by Amazon.com, Inc. or its affiliates, including Amazon Web Services, Inc.” from https://github.com/awslabs/pgbouncer-rr-patch/blob/master/LI...
Is this a one off activity, or does Amazon do this regularly as part of their moat?
Given how much AWS relies on developers, it boggles the mind how they get away with this kind of behaviour.
He is only nicely and asking for recognition/attribution while acknowledging that it's not required per licence.
I don't know why people have to take sides or be angry about it. Just as amazon was free to take his project and make it their own, he is Free to mention the fact that someone is indeed selling his work without even giving an open mention.
My guess is that none of the people who are lecturing and gloating have ever written anything substantial. Shame on you.
Just pointing out the hypocrisy of embracing "openness" and "free software" that anyone could use freely, then getting mad when someone does use it.
Also it's funny to see the FOSS crowd rediscover the need for intellectual property, having denounced it when it was applied in the opposite direction.
You're basically implying people who do not subscribe to you philosophy as lazy and/or unproductive.
As for the author, it sucks, but companies, moral and law, don't stand on the same side of the balance.
How is it not treated fairly in a moral sense?
I don’t think many comments are hostile. The title is entirely clickbait, and for generating PR for the author.
Therefore, shouldn't he be thanking Amazon for spreading his software?
Personally I'm disappointed with the exploitation view, but I also think it's an interesting example of how different assumptions lead groups to talk past each other. "AWS was in complete compliance, what's the problem?" versus "AWS violated the spirit of the community". Each camp agrees with the other camp's assertion but sees it as irrelevant.
However, if their names attached to such decisions were plastered all over LinkedIn, GitHub, or the even the project "look who is using our project" page, the responsibility that went with that decision authority just went up a noticeable amount. With REST API access to graph-networked tracking of such decisions, someone's track record of these kinds of decisions will follow them. Forever. Such tracking will also start revealing companies with a certain track record. The consequences of that are up to those in the future making decisions whether to interact with those individuals. It could be neutral, beneficial, or adverse, depending upon who they deal with.
Also, nothing prevents open source projects from tapping such aggregated data in an automated fashion, and auto-updating an exception to their open source license. "Anyone may license under <foo-open-source> license, except for the following list of individuals: ..., And except for the following list of companies: ..., <followed-by-legal-stuff-preventing-assignations-for-example>. For you, <consequence-decided-by-project>." Licenses are similarly amended to generate the attribution data in the first place.
That consequence can be whatever strikes the fancy of the project. Whether it be must license commercially, must post a LinkedIn video of them singing "Good Ship Lollipop" before they can license under the open source license, must post an escrow bond they forfeit if they violate the terms, etc.
Shine a light upon the natural person authority, and see who steps into the spotlight proud to show off their accountability.
I see not problem with a lack of attribution, but that means I support "exploitation"?
why not describe your own position as the "egocentric" view?
Definition 2 of exploitation: "the action of making use of and benefiting from resources."
Definition 1: "the action or fact of treating someone unfairly in order to benefit from their work.".
I don't like being accused of bad faith though, I do put a lot of effort into strong-manning positions I disagree with.
Sometimes communities get built up on a shared system that involves a certain amount of shame, embarrassment and feelings of communal good and following norms in order to continue.
Open source software seems to be that type of community. Sure, you can be a freerider and tip 0%, but at a certain point others in the community may glare at you with a "really?" face and of course restaurants will eventually just raise their prices.
Just as tipping is a shitty system and the explicit & transparent European model is better, so is using a license that clearly spells out (requires) the type of attribution you want better than relying on vague implicit expectations.
Amazon in particular is well known to be aggressively anti-competitive, as we saw with the Diapers.com fiasco. So logically, if you allow them to use your open source project for free, you run the risk of supporting the company that is going to run you out of business if they ever decide to compete with you. Might as well grab a piece of the pie on your way out!
I really do think we need a couple of new licenses along these lines to become popular enough to be generally accepted. Having said that, I struggle to really grok the language in these licenses; it could be that I'm just more familiar with MIT, BSD and the like, but with the Polyform licenses I'm always left with questions about what I can and can't do.
Every multi billion dollar company: runs subsidiary to not trigger legal threshold. They probably do it anyway for tax purposes.
We ran into that, sort of, although the only one it ultimately affected was the author of the free software that we wanted to use. We were a small company doing development for a major Japanese software distributor. He wanted a virtual CD product that would make images of your CD-ROMs and let you use those images. We were using zLib to compress the images, but he said it was too slow. zLib has settings to sacrifice some compression to gain speed, but they would not gain enough speed while maintaining the minimum amount of compression he wanted.
I found a zLib compatible library that some grad student at a nearby major university had written in assembly for speed. It was very good, handily beating zLib, and he even used the same assembler we used (Watcom). The library was GPL, which was not acceptable to the distributor we were writing for, so I contacted him about a different license.
We agreed on some reasonable price to use his library in that product, and some reasonable larger price for a license to use it in all our future products. But then he started worrying--our products were for Windows. What if we caught Microsoft's attention and they bought us, and his code ended up available for all of Microsoft to use.
He wanted to negotiate a license that would cover all of the kind of thing to make sure his code could not end up at Microsoft or some other big company. Negotiating that would require our CEO's involvement, and probably bringing in outside lawyers. The CEO did not have the time for that nor any interest in it, and told me to figure something else out.
I did. I went back to zLib, and I added a slider to our UI which went from 0 to 100, labeled something like "Faster ripping" on the 0 end and "Smaller Images" on the 100 end. If the slider was set to N when ripping an image, I used zLib at maximum compression setting on N out of every 100 sectors ripped and stored 100-N out of every 100 sectors ripped uncompressed. The distributor was delighted with this. (I have never been able to decide if I should be proud of this solution or deeply shamed by it).
25 years later, and nothing from then ended up at Microsoft or anywhere else, and that grad student lost out on several thousand easy dollars that I'm sure would have been very nice and useful for him to have.
People start looking at things differently when they're asked to pay for them and they start comparison shopping. Would people pay for LibreOffice over MS Office? Would people pay for GIMP over Photoshop? Some would, most wouldn't. It would kill corporate adoption of FOSS and, since most FOSS development is done by people employed by corporations, that would shrink the userbase and reduce the sustainability of FOSS.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24579628
https://blog.timescale.com/blog/building-open-source-busines...
My company heavily depends on OS from some great projects: we make money based on other people's hard work too.
Just a short "shout out" would have been nice. We do that with many open source projects, or we sponsor them. And we are a tiny tiny company.
How does that even work, anyway? If the developer were outside of America, would it still have to be taken to the country where the company resides? There's no international court I know of that would handle these kind of things.
Next thing which developer can do is, check if amazon is up-streaming new updates and bugfixes to their product, are they contributing to the existing open issues for bug-fixing,if yes that's win-win for both.
if you are planning to leverage the project for commercial product, I would suggest future dual-licensing clause which is like "Any contribution to the project will be licensed under AGPL, and XYZ LLP will get its copy as a full ownership with WTFPL license exclusively". Add an enterprise plan for your product where big corps can purchase its code license directly from you for fair price to get it under GPL/Apache license. just my 2 cents.
The initial egalitarian view of OSS never came to fruition.
OSS is just companies like Google and Facebook throwing things on the other side of the fence to help their own business monopolies.
There aren't actually ANY OSS models where independent developers can make money to support their own code.
It's all support and services for some of the intermediate companies or you have to be FANG.
We need "free as in $19.95" for OSS where the code is open but licensing/payments are compelled.
A way to look at it is "less freedom is more freedom".
For example, if we had infinite freedom and no laws the world wouldn't work. So we compromise and accept the right amount of laws.
I think it's the same thing with OSS ... we could all public domain our code but most people don't because putting your code under a license has value. It's LESS free than public domain but more free because you're giving a license to the user but they can't sue you because they're no implied warranty.
If we had an a source code license that forced someone like Amazon to license the code we wouldn't be in this position.
License - what AWS did is "legal", most commercial software is built on top of OSS.
Decency - what AWS did was mean. They should at least acknowledge the author.
Worst possible outcome of this thread: the community will become scared of big corporations stealing their hard work - this will stifle OSS creativity.
However. He has every right to point out that they are using his code. And I think it would be at least polite to mention that, and it is in my opinion impolite not to mention it.
And actually a little misleading when they don't mention using an open source system that is similar.
And it's not like the fact that he didn't say that in his license means he is not allowed to mention he made that software.
So I think better late than never, put the requirements you want in the license for credit. Or go AGPL or whatever. Although obviously that's not retroactive on the previous version.
This also proves that someone thinks it's a business. So I feel like there might be an opportunity to launch a competitor, with a main advantage that they have the actual talent that created the system.
This is fine of course. We have many competitors.
Can someone check the source code of the extension?
(It's certainly weird that 30+ comments in, everyone else is taking sides without even questioning the IMO not terribly well supported premise.)
Edit: Okay, judging from NOTICES.txt it is.
https://twitter.com/maxibanki/status/1317071448322789376?s=1...
The conversation ends there, doesn't it?
It's like not saying thanks to the barista when you get your coffee. Not the end of the world, but it's still a touch rude.
You're not legally required to say "Hi" when you run into people you know and making it legally enforceable would be a legal nightmare, but it's the decent thing to do.
They are of course well within their rights as per the license to behave like this but there's a notion of being courteous, grateful, and constructive in the OSS world that comes with being a responsible OSS citizen and that goes a long way to ensure people volunteer to help you out with bugs, support, change requests, etc. It doesn't cost anything to just reach out and give this person some kudos. It's the right thing to do.
Amazon is being a bit insensitive here and this sounds to me like somebody up high ought to do a bit of yelling internally about acting professionally and not needlessly burning bridges with the OSS people that they depend on for their core business. At least I'd be all over this if I were confronted with this kind of behavior by one of my colleagues. Not cool. A public apology would go a long way to fixing this; maybe a couple of lines in the readme. Doesn't cost a thing.
AWS did something rude, unprofessional, and indicative of bad OSS citizenship. The fact that the lawyers can sign off on it is irrelevant.
Individual developers spend their free time developing a solution without making as much as a cent, while giant corporations are making billions on it.
How did that become a thing?
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/open-source-misses-the-point....
I preferred the days when there was a mass of small developers selling software to what we have now. It feels like we have gone backwards.
I said that in the '90s, because it was obvious even back then, and it was drowned out by the "We're gonna destroy all the evil proprietary software giants and all code will be free forever, yeah!" chorus. It's nice to finally be vindicated.
It became a "thing" because the incentives of FOSS software are to maximize developer freedom, not to ensure compensation for the developer. That doesn't change when the "developer" is a trillion dollar corporation.
I could bet a decent amount that AWS legal department does not even know this was forked from OSS.
This is probably some dev or PM who found out about the project and decided they were in-line for a promotion using someone else's work.
Maybe programmers should realize it's in our common interest to have some kind of group voice. Other random groups with lower stakes seem to get concessions.
How about instead of role-playing as lawyers, we realize that maybe they should've thrown this guy a bone in the form of an attribution purely for the purposes of etiquette.
I assume he personally thanked all of the technologies that he's used as well?
Giving attribution (and monetary compensation) to the lawyers who make open source licensing function is also a thing.
I'm seeing a lot of comments here that are attempting to brow beat or bully people for having a view you disagree with. "The author should have used a different license." This is an opinion, we can disagree about it. There's no need to tell people to be ashamed for disagreeing with you, or to make baseless ad hominem attacks such as 'I bet none of you have ever written anything substantial.'
This is a discussion forum. FS/OSS licensing is an extremely contentious subject as everyone in the OS community probably already knows. People are going to disagree. Let's keep this a clean fight where we discuss the merits of different arguments and attack arguments rather than attacking people, shall we?
Trying to "shame" people who disagree with you or talk about how "disappointed" you are in them or maligning their professional work is not argumentation, it's bullying.
EDIT: while writing this comment, someone called me "autistic" in another sub-thread here. Gave me a chuckle... anyway add that to the ad-hom pile.
Is the author calling them out fair. Yes.
Also fair, me assuming everybody defending AWS here is a terrible person.
The cloud providers taking over open-source projects, launching their own forks (with restrictive licenses) etc isn't great for the open-source ecosystem. If you take away the incentives for the developers (respect, fame, etc) to write open-source software, then isn't it kind of doomed in the long run?
She now gets fired because open source means open only for some.
The main value add is AWS is hosting it. Amazon isn't being an angel, they could of easily given the author a solid 20k donation as a thank you. Apart of releasing MIT or Apache licensed code is knowing someone else might take it and make millions.
If you want to restrict your software usage you can use GPL.
Maybe there is a way to define "bad" practices in OS outside of license. Similar to how monopolistic practices are banned in business because they are unhealthy for the broader ecosystem. Just asking
> use Elastic Software Object Code for providing time-sharing services, any software-as-a-service, service bureau services or as part of an application services provider or other service offering (collectively, "SaaS Offering") where obtaining access to the Elastic Software or the features and functions of the Elastic Software is a primary reason or substantial motivation for users of the SaaS Offering to access and/or use the SaaS Offering ("Prohibited SaaS Offering");
https://raw.githubusercontent.com/elastic/elasticsearch/mast...
Now that it's a megacorp, Amazon's employees are no longer the presumably highly talented people that got it started. That is, their newer successes are not a result of disproportionate talent or hard work that would make those successes deserved. Instead it's just another big company that has big capital. And all a big company with big capital needs to do is keep an eye on early successes elsewhere to get into the game, throw lots of resources at the problem, leverage their big mature sales and marketing channels, and see the Dollars roll in. This is not what a healthy market is meant to reward.
This is similar to other open source projects which GPL their project instead of AGPL, and then get angry when people and companies (like Amazon), literally abide by the terms of your license but you don't like the outcome. Then they act all offended like someone did something wrong. If you don't like it, switch your project to AGPL and stop trying to act like someone did anything but honor the license you released your code under.
People like this do damage to open source because they blindly pick their licenses rather than understanding what they mean.
A couple of years later, they brought on the creator of Boto (AWS SDK for Python), but I bitched at them so much to make absolutely sure that what happened to me wouldn't happen to Mitch. Boto is still an independent OSS project today.
Me, fighting against the internal Amazon culture tooth-and-nail to try to get them to do things that were in the best interests of AWS customers. Some of the most brilliant and customer-centric people I've ever worked with got ran out of there by management (well, one particular engineering director) after 18-24 months.
All the fighting led to them trying to "manage me out" (making my life a living hell, hoping to make me quit), so I decided to stay for a full 4 years in order to vest every ounce of my stock grants, before walking away in 2014 (six months before AWS released "Lambda").
If things are better there now, that's really great for the people who work there. But it was a hell-scape for me to try to bring AWS into the modern age for open-source software in such a backwards-ass internal culture.
These licenses were created pre-cloud era when on-premise was a thing and "Intranet" was a word. I grew fond of open source from high-school days as a kid in India because I felt the power that everyone is sharing their best creations for me to learn from. The spirit of open source, at least to me dates back to 1998.
Things have changed, a few providers host everything for every business. Do you feel open source would have taken same approach if started now?
Specially license tailored against every one of them, by name?
EDIT: notice that usage of the AGPL produces the desired effect, while still being free software (which it wouldn't be the case if you excluded specific users in your license terms).
That's literally the deal you offered.
OTH, if you treat people like a jerk (for example by forking their code and not involving or crediting them) there are practical social repercussions from that, but probably AWS is not much impacted by that.
I think they have a clause saying you can't provide Redis as a Service without paying royalty.
It does feel like we go in circles sometimes in tech, all these license discussions, closed v/s open v/s closed.
I really hope AWS does the decent thing and acknowledges and maybe even donates to the project.
This whole bit reeks of mercenary behaviour. Sure, the license allows it, but AWS still can afford to be a better citizen.
They all seem to be trying to funnel you into a related SaaS product.
Selenium webdriver JS could really use some extra support from the community. 4.0 has been alpha for over three years.
Yes, a nod back is nice, but its not a requirement and we shouldn't use public opinion to try to put extra obligations on the reusers beyond what the license requires. Especially if its beyond what would probably be considered a valid osi approved license.
At this point I think it's plausible that the only reason commercial forks haven't "embrace extend extinguish" Linux is the GPL. I'll certainly be considering the GPL if I start any open source projects, giant corporations have no morals.
I personally am of the opinion that AWS doesn't own the author anything, even acknowledgement.
Why?
APL, MIT , BSD allows companies fork a project without acknowledgement or contributing back.
It seems to me they did exactly what you expected them to by the terms of your public api, and are bitter the leapordsateyourface
2. Grant of Copyright License. Subject to the terms and conditions of
this License, each Contributor hereby grants to You a perpetual,
worldwide, non-exclusive, no-charge, royalty-free, irrevocable
copyright license to reproduce, prepare Derivative Works of,
publicly display, publicly perform, sublicense, and distribute the
Work and such Derivative Works in Source or Object form
This is sarcasm, right? Right?
Situations like this are precisely why the industry pushes so hard for APL and BSD/MIT, and against A/L/GPL: because you do the work and they make the money.
He seized the opportunity to advertise his product on the topic article on HN.
https://tldrlegal.com/license/apache-license-2.0-(apache-2.0...
i mean, as long as they include the license, they don't have to give any credit whatsoever.
remember this, companies do things according to their legal department and i'm almost certain that their legal department said flat out that if they credit the author they could set themselves up for a lawsuit down the line. so they followed the license requirements to the book.
if the author is pissed about a big company using his project and them not giving him a props, he should have used a license that requires an attribution of the original author.
Matt Asay @mjasay · Tim, I run the open source strategy and marketing team at AWS. I hadn't been aware of this but am looking into it. (Regardless of anything we may have done, thank you for what you clearly have done with your project)
Standard Disclaimer: I’m a consultant at AWS. Opinions are my own.
In a month / year / etc when this thread gets deleted, there'll just be a HN comments section speculating about a missing twitter thread. The least we could do here is ask posters to capture the thread in a blog post along with a summary of points, so it doesn't have to be re-created in the comments here. This is potentially an important post that we want a historical record of, and Twitter is just not built for that.
Sigh.
Copyright licence is a legally binding document. You can talk about the community all you like, but the legal system doesn't give a damn.
Sticking your head in the sand won't make the problem go away.