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Comment by slt2021 | Hacker News Reader

slt2021

For trucking company owning and developing trucks makes sense.

But does it make sense for a trucking(streaming) company to create own plumbing equipment? I’d rather use Plumbers Supply Inc that every other company uses from Plumber Depot or use open-source-plumbers.com, because I am not in a plumbing business

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The margin on trucking could be so much higher than plumbing that most plumbers could never afford the R&D necessary to advance flushing tech. Big truck operates at a scale where they materially benefit from better flushing, so they take their truck dollars and pour them into their own plumbing lab. Big truck sees this as a competitive advantage that no one else is positioned in the market to unlock. They may one day enter the general plumbing space and disrupt waste management, at their option not obligation of course.

This describes Google and Amazon perfectly - while you can armchair quarterback their biz decisions they are definitely doing well for themselves.

Amazon actually steals a lot of open source and repackages it as a “managed AWS service”, they literally deployed managed Airflow as soon as it became popular.

The whole aws reinvent is repackaged whatever open source project is trending, hiding control plane from the user and instead expose it via AWS control plane and charge people per usage instead of per server

Can you steal something that is given away freely? People are buying those services so they must be providing some value.

I was just replying to the comment above that amazon somehow rolls their own stuff and gives back to the community by open sourcing their systems.

Amazon’s approach is the opposite: steal open source repo and make $$$ off of open source contributors’ labor

I can't find a single line in the Apache software license that would indicate that Amazon is breaking any agreements set forth for Airflow.

Accept they also provide the security, billing/invoicing, IaaC, support, provisioning, scaling, list goes on.

As for pay per server vs pay per usage. Heck you know Amazon actually bills the team who caused the cost. And gives finance a report on how much each team is spending and on what. Good luck doing that on prem.

The question is how much do they give back to the open source community, after making boatloads of $$$ off of opensource contributions and whether their model is sustainable and healthy for the FOSS movement

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