[HN Gopher] AWS forked my project and launched it as its own ser...
___________________________________________________________________
AWS forked my project and launched it as its own service
Author : tnolet
Score : 1328 points
Date : 2020-10-16 11:23 UTC (11 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (twitter.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (twitter.com)
| victorantos wrote:
| He just wanted some attention. And he got it.
| throwaway4good wrote:
| Developers just want to be loved.
| lki876 wrote:
| He deserves it.
| throwaway4good wrote:
| You were giving it away so someone else made a business out of it
| ...
| soumyadeb wrote:
| Can there be a license - Permissive Open source for the rest of
| the world except the cloud providers? Or some kind of anti-
| monopolistic rule to protect open-source?
|
| 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?
| offtop5 wrote:
| What about the new Amazon Intern who finds an awesome open
| source project.
|
| 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.
| soumyadeb wrote:
| I hear you but GPL makes it hard for everyone else (most
| companies have policies against GPL). We run an open-source
| project and it's AGPL licensed for the exact same reason. But
| lot of orgs have blanket ban on AGPL.
|
| 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
| offtop5 wrote:
| Ohh I get your point. What I'm saying is if your not ok
| with the biggest company on Earth using your code you need
| to release it GPL.
|
| Dual licencing is also a strategy, GPL is free and
| commercial usage can be $5,000 a year or whatever.
| whoevercares wrote:
| It's called "bias for action". Actually AWS/Amazon operates like
| a United States of Startups and the decision is commonly made by
| team at the bottom of the org tree. So it's likely a few
| engineers and managers decide to fork it just to launch something
| for their KPI. As long as their legal agrees, the leadership has
| no idea about how team do it
| [deleted]
| hehetrthrthrjn wrote:
| "free software for me but not for thee"
| smt923 wrote:
| that kinda implies two equal parties instead of a solo dev
| doing something in their spare time vs an evil megacorp
| StavrosK wrote:
| I'd actually support a license that said "it's OSS except
| Google/Amazon can't take my thing, launch as a service and
| charge for it".
| hackerfromthefu wrote:
| Amen
| ChrisRR wrote:
| Why choose to publish open source if you then complain about
| people using your code? If he didn't want that, he should've used
| a non-commercial clause
|
| I assume he personally thanked all of the technologies that he's
| used as well?
| bryanlarsen wrote:
| Because all the author wanted was credit, and there's no
| appropriate license for that. The 4 clause BSD license has
| dropped out of favor for several good reasons and nothing else
| has taken its place.
| barkingcat wrote:
| You know that licenses are able to be written and rewritten
| right? If someone wanted attribution, someone could hire a
| lawyer and make a license (or make an edit/fork of an
| existing license) that does what someone needs.
|
| Giving attribution (and monetary compensation) to the lawyers
| who make open source licensing function is also a thing.
| ludocode wrote:
| He wrote some code and gave it away freely, and all he
| wanted was a thank you. You say he should have hired a
| lawyer to write his own license. This is absurd.
| levosmetalo wrote:
| If that's what he wanted what stopped him from adding one
| more paragraph to the licence saying something similar
| to:
|
| "The USER is required to publicly thank AUTHOR, and make
| the thanking reproducible in every copy of the derived
| work that uses this software."
|
| You don't need a lawyer for that. And if someone wants to
| use his work without attribution, they are free to
| negotiate a copy with different licence terms directly
| with the author and provide a compensation.
| ojnabieoot wrote:
| The whole point of these highly permissive licenses is
| that we don't want to constrain independent hackers, or
| put people in a position where they are unsure if their
| fork might expose them to liability.
|
| It is undoubtedly discourteous of AWS to release an OSS
| fork as a new feature without crediting the original
| author. It is not the end of the world. It is not a
| reason to go and change your licenses to make things more
| difficult for the other 95% of developers. But it is a
| reason to say "some people at AWS are just dang ol'
| jerks."
| EamonnMR wrote:
| I'm not sure most companies would touch software with a
| nonstandard license like that though.
| dx87 wrote:
| The author needs to decide what's more important then,
| getting a pat on the back, or contributing to OSS. It's
| pretty crappy using a permissive license so companies are
| willing to use the software, then trying to make them
| look bad for not following unwritten rules.
| barkingcat wrote:
| Isn't that the point?
|
| Companies want to take and exploit free/opensource
| licenses in exactly this way.
|
| By putting in a clause for attribution for example, you
| winnow away the companies like Amazon who would totally
| want to fork and re-release without crediting you.
|
| If a company doesn't want to credit you, and your license
| is dissuading them from forking your project, then the
| non-standard license has achieved its goal.
|
| You can't have it both ways. It's like people complaining
| that the GPL is "viral". That's the whole point of it.
| Companies that don't want to re-contribute their source
| changes are dissuaded from using it at all.
|
| If you put an attribution clause in the license, the
| companies that don't touch your code is the company you
| never wanted to use your code at all. You can't have it
| both ways. You can't say "I need the exposure so I use a
| totally permissive license" and then say "Oh but I
| actually want attribution in a way that if people knew
| about this requirement, wouldn't use it to begin with"
| nullsense wrote:
| Author should have just used the Credit Where Credit Is Due
| license.
| bananabiscuit wrote:
| I haven't been keeping up with what licenses are popular, but
| I'm curious about this because The BSD license was my
| favorite a few decades ago. Can you please elaborate why it
| dropped out of favor?
| bryanlarsen wrote:
| The BSD license is still popular, but in its 3 clause or 2
| clause form, without the attribution clause.
|
| The main reason it was dropped was because it created an
| incompatibility with the GPL. The other reason was because
| operating systems became an unwieldy mess of attributions.
| warrenq wrote:
| Did the author thank the Vim or Visual Studio Code Devs or
| Linux Torvalds for all the tools he used for making his
| library?
| jbezos64 wrote:
| cheers Tim it's mine now
| nvr219 wrote:
| Oh snap it's Jeff
| boltefnovor wrote:
| Quick everyone stop talking, Jeff's here.
| preommr wrote:
| Like with many things related to license and copyright, this is
| an issue of culture.
|
| 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.
| timdorr wrote:
| Does anyone know where the source code is hosted? If they forked
| that project, doesn't it need to be made public?
| AnssiH wrote:
| No, unless the license requires it. In this case it does not.
| [deleted]
| oefrha wrote:
| Taking permissively licensed open source code without so much of
| an attribution obviously sucks, but I can't quite see the
| evidence that this is a fork? Same concept, sure. Code generated
| is similar but different enough, and there aren't really many
| ways to express the similar bits... Interface isn't exactly
| breakthrough either, anyone would have used a textarea + buttons.
| (Only looked at the screenshots.)
|
| 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.
| Closi wrote:
| It is the same code - Someone on Twitter noticed that if you
| download the Chrome extension and look in the notices.txt file
| of that bundle, the first line reads puppeteer-recorder v0.7.2
| xmaayyy wrote:
| It's in the third or fourth tweet that the link to his website
| is in the extensions
|
| https://twitter.com/maxibanki/status/1317071448322789376?s=1...
| bogwog wrote:
| Situations like this make me wonder why no one has created an
| open source license with a clause excluding multi billion dollar
| companies. If your company makes more than, say, $50 billion in
| revenue per year or something crazy like that, then you need to
| pay for a license. Everyone else can use the free license.
|
| 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!
| marcinzm wrote:
| That creates problems for anyone who ever wants to sell their
| business to or sell services to any larger company. Which
| covers a lot of smaller companies. The license would trigger
| all sorts of legal red flags during due diligence for either
| case. And not just with the companies it's supposed to cover
| but any large company (ie: what if they one day trigger the
| clause, how well defined is the clause, what if they are
| partially owned/invested in by a larger company, etc, etc,
| etc).
| tzs wrote:
| > That creates problems for anyone who ever wants to sell
| their business to or sell services to any larger company
|
| 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.
| asim wrote:
| Polyform Shield is what you're looking for
| https://polyformproject.org/licenses/
| GordonS wrote:
| I've seen these Polyform licenses touted on HN a couple of
| times recently.
|
| 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.
| asim wrote:
| I think its likely familiarity. Licensing is legal
| terminology so anything new requires time to reason about.
| In this case I am a strong advocate for these licenses as
| they're written in part by Heather Meeker who has authored
| some of the custom licenses for Redis Labs, MongoDB, etc to
| protect against this cloud provider hosting issue.
| GordonS wrote:
| Then I'd love for them to get some more attention,
| discussion and scrutiny in the community, because I think
| that's the only chance new licenses have at gaining wider
| adoption.
| minerjoe wrote:
| Could we write a license so that if a big company uses my
| software they have to send me a pony? A real live pony?
| richardwhiuk wrote:
| You could. No big company would use your software.
| Zenbit_UX wrote:
| Idk, a pony sounds cheaper than a single day of work for
| one dev at a FAANG company. I'd have to at least consider
| the pony option.
| GordonS wrote:
| True, but have you ever been involved in purchasing at a
| big company? Trying to procure and ship a pony would take
| longer than just writing the software yourself (I'm not
| even joking).
| Muromec wrote:
| > with a clause excluding multi billion dollar companies.
|
| Every multi billion dollar company: runs subsidiary to not
| trigger legal threshold. They probably do it anyway for tax
| purposes.
| varispeed wrote:
| You can exclude companies that have multi billion company in
| their tree.
| pas wrote:
| So someone launches a new company that provides services
| for everyone, including billion dollar companies.
|
| Basically unless you put a non-commercial license on it,
| any effort to limit its use will be easily circumvented.
| bogwog wrote:
| The middle man increases costs and inefficiency for the
| billion dollar companies, giving a competitive advantage
| to everyone else. It's foolproof I tell ya!
| varispeed wrote:
| You cannot circumvent that. If you want to do a service
| for a company that has a multi billion company in the
| chain then you would have to get full commercial license
| and when that happens you simply raise an invoice to the
| client that covers this cost. It is pretty simple and you
| cannot get around it.
| fuball63 wrote:
| There was a discussion a few weeks back about TimescaleDB doing
| a "Cloud Protection License", which seems to mean that they
| reserve the right to offer the product in a cloud offering.
| Seemed to me like a good compromise.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24579628
|
| https://blog.timescale.com/blog/building-open-source-busines...
| ThrowawayR2 wrote:
| > " _Situations like this make me wonder why no one has created
| an open source license with a clause excluding multi billion
| dollar companies._ "
|
| 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.
| CydeWeys wrote:
| Why so high? Why not, say, $10M? If you want to be paid for
| your work, why let most of even the Fortune 500 still use it
| for free?
| KaoruAoiShiho wrote:
| You'll have less users with such a license, in reality only a
| tiny percentage of even huge companies use your code in a way
| that is annoying or make you feel like you should get
| something back for it and it's hard to target such companies
| specifically rather than crater the popularity of your
| project entirely.
| zelly wrote:
| If you don't want someone to copy it, don't put it up on the
| internet.
| riemannzeta wrote:
| Wondering how the decision in Oracle v. Google might affect
| Amazon's practices in this regard.
| orasis wrote:
| Is anyone aware of a source available license that can be
| used/modified by others? Redis Labs won't let others use their
| license.
| [deleted]
| tuna-piano wrote:
| If Amazon employees started tipping 0% at restaurants in Seattle,
| they would be legally correct. But that would certainly impact
| the way restaurants needed to operate.
|
| 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.
| sequoia wrote:
| Fantastic analogy: tipping is a vestige of a culture of
| patronage and servitude and a practice that doesn't exist (in
| the same form) in most of Europe for example, where servers
| rely on an explicit obligation of payment rather than "whatever
| the customer feels like giving."
|
| 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.
| xigency wrote:
| I hear you, but tipping is a widely accepted practice. As a
| software developer I use tons of open source software and I'm
| aware of how much open source software is used in commercial
| products I use as well. And still I can't recall seeing credits
| with the original developers' names ever outside of a license
| file. I'm not saying that is good or bad, but it doesn't seem
| to be standard practice.
| qvrjuec wrote:
| Interesting analogy, because a growing trend in Seattle
| restaurants is eschewing tipping entirely for a fixed %
| gratuity included in the bill. I agree with the other
| commenters in the thread - if you're peeved because you didn't
| get something your permissive license didn't require, choose a
| new license.
| ilaksh wrote:
| It does seem like the license should have asked for a mention if
| that's what he wanted.
|
| 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.
| Lightbody wrote:
| Worth noting: he _has_ a competing business. It was started
| before Amazon launched theirs in fact. Checkly, his startup,
| does synthetic monitoring, which Amazon got into after he was
| already into it.
| tnolet wrote:
| Yes, AWS's canary service competes directly with my company
| https://checklyhq.com
|
| This is fine of course. We have many competitors.
| sheeshkebab wrote:
| Are there open source licenses that specifically ban major cloud
| providers from using software and letting others use it on Apache
| 2 terms?
|
| Specially license tailored against every one of them, by name?
| enriquto wrote:
| No need to mention them by name. Just use the AGPL, for they
| are all irrationally allergic to it.
|
| 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).
| ojosilva wrote:
| AGPL may go too far sometimes, as to intimidate companies
| from using an opensource project internally, and not
| necessarily as a (user-facing) service as in the case with
| the OP and AWS.
|
| That's due to fact that AGPL's _user interaction_ clauses can
| be too vague in legal terms, in a way that many internal use
| cases could be litigated as a user interaction over a
| network.
|
| It has been discussed before here:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16636963
| tannhaeuser wrote:
| It won't take long until OSI heads come in and tell you that
| sort of licensing isn't "Open Source" (a commonly used term
| they bogusly claim exclusive control over). Who's financing OSI
| again?
| red2awn wrote:
| CockroachDB changed their license to address this specific
| issue. See https://www.cockroachlabs.com/docs/stable/licensing-
| faqs.htm...
| EamonnMR wrote:
| AGPL tries to do this but it's otherwise similar to GPL rather
| than Apache 2.
| tannhaeuser wrote:
| AGPL in no way prevents anyone to use the licensed software.
| It just demands, like GPL, that modifications be made
| available to users, but in addition to GPL, extends this duty
| to the case where the licensed software is used remotely/as a
| service (rather than "distributed" to users for use on their
| own computer).
| burtonator wrote:
| I'm going to get downvoted to hell but Open Source is broken.
|
| 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.
| lovetocode wrote:
| Congrats!
| thrownaway954 wrote:
| i don't see what the issue is. his project is licensed under
| apache2:
|
| 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.
| hobofan wrote:
| I'm surprised the author was even able to figure out that it was
| their code being used. AFAIK there are multiple headless
| recorders out there, so I would have assumed that it would be any
| of them.
| jasonhansel wrote:
| This is why we use the AGPL.
| smusamashah wrote:
| > Oh @awscloud I really do :Two hearts: you! But next time you
| fork my OS project https://github.com/checkly/headless-recorder
| and present it as your new service, give the maintainers a short
| "nice job, kids" or something. Not necessary as per the APLv2
| license, but still, ya know?
|
| 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.
| hashkb wrote:
| Are those on this forum not similarly free to express their
| judgment?
| Aeolun wrote:
| I guess they are. It would just be nice if they paused and
| check they made that judgement based on what they actually
| read, instead of the initial emotion they felt while reading.
| loufe wrote:
| To be fair: as mentioned elsewhere in the comments, Amazon did
| in fact credit him, and he admitted his mistake later in the
| Twitter thread.
| kllrnohj wrote:
| Incorrect. Amazon included the legally-required NOTICES,
| which isn't what he was asking for. And similarly the author
| did not admit any such mistake as no such mistake was made.
| unreal37 wrote:
| There is no evidence that they "credited him" explicitly,
| merely that his source code, which they copied, included a
| link to his website.
| janOsch wrote:
| In my mind there are two aspects on the matter:
|
| 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.
| victor9000 wrote:
| Elastic Search ran into this same problem and came up with the
| Elastic License. In particular, it stipulates that you may not:
|
| > 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...
| 43423434 wrote:
| Love the comments here siding with a 1.70 trillion dollar megacap
| company over an open source developer.
| guhcampos wrote:
| Despite the legalisms that may or not may be relevant, and
| despite being Amazon or any big company.
|
| 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.
| known wrote:
| You may want to hire a qualified lawyer to "settle" the matter
| with Amazon;
| aloukissas wrote:
| It seems to my untrained eyes that this was a poor choice of OSS
| license. See a recent discussion from earlier this week about how
| Plausible switched licenses for this reason:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24763734
| brainless wrote:
| For anyone who is saying "your license allows it":
|
| 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?
| LoSboccacc wrote:
| 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
|
| if you wanted a nod, add a "give me a nod if you fork" clause,
| you're allowed to.
| dividedbyzero wrote:
| IANAL, but I believe that may make your license practically
| unenforceable, because all precedents can be argued to not
| apply because of that change, and even if untrue, just having
| that sort of argument in court quickly gets prohibitively
| expensive.
| jasode wrote:
| There are some replies in this thread that misunderstood the
| content of Tim Nolet's twitter post. (Probably because the short
| headline has pitchfork raising overtones.)
|
| - 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"_.
| lwh wrote:
| The original BSD license had this "advertising clause" and it
| was removed
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BSD_licenses#4-clause_license_...
|
| Personally I'd rather have their source be released like AGPL,
| as that would credit the authors and let me see their changes.
| tinus_hn wrote:
| Because it's a great idea but for instance the Linux kernel
| would have to come with documentation that mentions the tens
| of thousands of authors. A massive undertaking that doesn't
| help anyone, really.
| thomasahle wrote:
| > for instance the Linux kernel would have to come with
| documentation that mentions the tens of thousands of
| authors
|
| It wouldn't be too hard to maintain though. Could probably
| mostly pull it out of git even.
| tinus_hn wrote:
| That's the easy 90% of the work. The rest is the hard
| 90%.
| segfaultbuserr wrote:
| Documentation is not the problem. The problem is that,
| the advertising clause requires ALL promotional materials
| to include these acknowledgements, for ALL software that
| has been used in the software. It was not a problem for
| BSD back then, since UCB was the only developer. But for
| projects with multiple copyright owners, such as the
| Linux kernel, a Linux distro poster would contain a
| thousand lines of acknowledgements, and this is not even
| counting the packages in the userspace.
| Xylakant wrote:
| The primary problem is that 4-clause BSD is incompatible
| with the GPL since it adds restrictions to distributing
| the software (notably the advertising clause)
| iso1631 wrote:
| GPL3 allows for advertising clauses -- e.g. in flowplayer
|
| https://github.com/flowplayer/flowplayer/blob/dev/LICENSE
| .md
|
| "The GPL requires that you not remove the Flowplayer logo
| and copyright notices from the user interface. See
| section 5.d below."
| Xylakant wrote:
| The GNU project disagrees:
|
| This license is also sometimes called the "4-clause BSD
| license".
|
| This is a lax, permissive non-copyleft free software
| license with a serious flaw: the "obnoxious BSD
| advertising clause". The flaw is not fatal; that is, it
| does not render the software nonfree. But it does cause
| practical problems, including incompatibility with the
| GNU GPL.
|
| https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-
| list.html#OriginalBSD
| [deleted]
| nitrogen wrote:
| A modern revisiting would probably require crediting the
| project as a whole rather than each individual author,
| and maybe have separate consideration for products that
| derive from a large number of such projects.
| toyg wrote:
| _> doesn't help anyone, really_
|
| Anyone except the contributors themselves who would forever
| get a piece of the Linux fame, but they are just like, free
| labor, amirite? /s
| rbanffy wrote:
| Linux is GPL and I doubt it would have tens of thousands of
| authors if it were not.
|
| It would have a dozen proprietary forks.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > Linux is GPL and I doubt it would have tens of
| thousands of authors if it were not.
|
| Why? There's plenty of permissive F/OSS projects with
| large numbers of contributors.
|
| > It would have a dozen proprietary forks.
|
| Probably, but proprietary forks don't stop F/OSS
| contributions. They can even be the source of them, as
| upstreaming everything that isn't secret sauce reduced
| the cost of maintaining the proprietary fork. A number of
| the big sources of F/OSS contributions to Postgres are
| maintainers of proprietary downstream distributions (I
| don't know that all are strictly forks, since I think the
| proprietary bits of at least some are using the extension
| mechanism.)
| rbanffy wrote:
| > Why? There's plenty of permissive F/OSS projects with
| large numbers of contributors.
|
| Companies invest in developing Linux to create a
| commodity they can leverage to sell their products and
| services. The GPL ensures the investment remains a
| commodity and cannot be used in proprietary products that
| can't be also leveraged by the initial contributor.
|
| There was a lot of BSD in the core of every proprietary
| Unix, each tied to a given manufacturer.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > There was a lot of BSD in the core of every proprietary
| Unix, each tied to a given manufacturer
|
| Except MacOS X, the major proprietary Unixes all predated
| permissively-licensed releases of BSD, and the early
| permissively licensed releases were under a copyright
| cloud for years that prevented anyone from relying on
| them for commercial downstream distributions.
| richardwhiuk wrote:
| The GPL doesn't have this advertising clause - it's
| largely specific to some BSD variants.
| rbanffy wrote:
| That's why Linux doesn't come with a 10,000+ page tome
| listing names ;-)
| ThrowawayR2 wrote:
| > " _Linux is GPL and I doubt it would have tens of
| thousands of authors if it were not._ "
|
| Aren't the BSDs a counterexample to that?
| rbanffy wrote:
| How many authors they have? My impression is that the
| number is much lower.
| iso1631 wrote:
| Something like https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/
| git/torvalds/lin...?
| zymhan wrote:
| I'm just venturing a guess here, but on older BSD
| systems, weren't the license and credits printed on
| startup?
|
| At least, I've seen the Copyright notice for the
| California Board of Regents in the macOS startup
| debugging.
| beojan wrote:
| > 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".
|
| 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.
| GuB-42 wrote:
| Isn't there a requirement to acknowledge the original author
| for all copyrighted work, no matter how permissive the license
| is? That is, the only way to not make it a requirement is to
| put the work in the public domain, and in some countries, it is
| not even an option.
|
| 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.
| qw3rty01 wrote:
| No, acknowledgement is only required if the license requires
| it.
| code4tee wrote:
| If you read further down the Twitter thread you'll see others
| point out that AWS actually DID acknowledge him in the release
| and thus his original rant isn't accurate. He acknowledges that
| later in the thread. Of course the, now inaccurate, headline
| Tweet remains the thing getting attention.
| wpietri wrote:
| I would hardly call that a rant. And I would hardly call a
| deeply buried source reference the kind of collegial social
| acknowledgement he was hoping for. So perhaps, as somebody
| very concerned about inaccuracy, you could correct your
| errors here?
| warkdarrior wrote:
| > collegial social acknowledgement
|
| Business offering a software service and open-source
| developer are not colleagues. One is selling a service, the
| other is writing code, there is simply no comparison.
| thatguyagain wrote:
| Are people really expecting the devs at AWS to give a "thank
| you" to every third party developer out there who's code they
| use? This is just ridiculous. When does this become an
| obligation? Is there an unwritten rule of how
| large/successful a team has to be before they need to give
| thank's like this?
| steerablesafe wrote:
| "thank you" is a pretty low price for software.
| sushicalculus wrote:
| I think thatguyagain is making a good point about
| infinite regress. Should we all add a thank you to our
| github pages, thanking every dependency, library,
| framework, to Stroustrup, to Stallman, to Linus, and to
| John von Neumann?
| darepublic wrote:
| Yes there needs to be a blockchain named gratitude; the
| shoulders of giants
| [deleted]
| IggleSniggle wrote:
| I'm with you on that one, but if you are literally just
| forking a package, rather than depending on a package,
| and rebranding it into your ecosystem, then a big "thank
| you for making this and making it open source" is
| appropriate.
| BeetleB wrote:
| > then a big "thank you for making this and making it
| open source" is appropriate.
|
| As is not doing it.
|
| Perhaps you did not mean to use the word "appropriate"?
| toyg wrote:
| I do tend to mention the major projects I build on in my
| credits, as well as actually respecting attribution
| licenses when I make my little forks. The effort is
| minimal, it's all good karma. If everyone did this, we'd
| probably have fewer "openssl" or "pgp" situations, as the
| people doing the work would get actual visibility through
| the chain.
| imtringued wrote:
| >Should we all add a thank you to our github pages,
| thanking every dependency, library, framework, to
| Stroustrup, to Stallman, to Linus, and to John von
| Neumann?
|
| Did you copy their inventions 1:1 and rebranded them as
| your own? No you didn't. You just used them which is
| different.
| wpietri wrote:
| If your understanding of somebody leads you to obvious
| absurdity, one possibility is they're being absurd. The
| other is that you misunderstood them. I think it's worth
| exploring both paths before posting to suggest somebody's
| a fool.
| rusk wrote:
| Eh yes. Even my TV has an open source acknowledgements
| section in the menu.
| tonyedgecombe wrote:
| We got a new oven last year and it came with a sheet of
| paper acknowledging all the open source software it used.
| prewett wrote:
| I'm really curious what open source software an oven
| uses? I would think all it needs is timers and a
| temperature monitoring loop.
| tonyedgecombe wrote:
| I didn't keep the sheet, the only one I remember is
| FreeType which must be for the digital display.
| TallGuyShort wrote:
| As does this - that's what the NOTICES file is for. When
| I've looked at it on TVs it looks the same: Copyright
| notice and license terms that they're required to bundle
| with any redistribution.
| amadeuspagel wrote:
| I don't think you need to give a "thank you" in the
| announcement to every library you use, but if you have a
| product that's just a fork of an open source project, then,
| yes, I definitely think you should thank them in the
| announcement.
| toolz wrote:
| If someone gave you tens of thousands of dollars of
| valuables would you say thank you? If people gave that to
| you regularly would you become too bothered to say thank
| you? especially when your acknowledgement could help the
| person giving you their wealth?
| BeetleB wrote:
| In communication circles, people differentiate between
| requests and demands. The key differentiator: Turning
| down a request does not lead to anything negative. In
| particular, the requestor is not displeased or upset. If
| he/she is, then it was likely a demand disguised as a
| request.
|
| On the other hand, fulfilling a request can, and often
| will, lead to a positive. It's still a request.
|
| If you're going to be upset about it, don't phrase it as
| a request. A big chunk of the population will be annoyed
| by it.
|
| Soapbox aside, getting to your comment: If someone is
| giving me that money unsolicited, I may or may not give a
| thank you. Context is extremely relevant. I did not give
| a "Thank you" to the recent stimulus check, for example.
| And I've definitely had fights with people _voluntarily_
| giving me stuff over and over and complaining about my
| not saying "thank you" (or even worse, not
| reciprocating). I've had to forbid them from giving me
| gifts in the future. I'm not saying my attitude is the
| norm, but it is "one of the norms".
|
| The book _Influence_ covers this topic in a lot of
| detail, and this is commonly discussed in Negotiations
| books. The bottom line: Be wary of gifts, and either
| reject if you suspect reciprocation is desired (which
| could mean "Thank you"), or make the understanding
| explicit and keep the reciprocity in mind. Of course,
| this goes at odds with several cultures.
|
| As much as we like to talk about "open source" culture,
| it doesn't exist. It gets argued to death every time it
| comes up, which is a good sign it doesn't exist. A big
| chunk of the SW world, if not the majority, do not feel a
| need to reciprocate - even with a thank you. (Most of
| that chunk are OK giving a "Thank you", and this is not a
| contradiction).
| aequitas wrote:
| Well since they save a tremendous amount of time and effort
| by incorporating code that other developers spend their
| time on it the least they could do. Heck, it's even
| possible to mostly automate this as a lot of companies
| already (automatically) check for licences that require
| attribution or have other conflicts before you release your
| product.
| nickbauman wrote:
| RedHat gave stock options to F/OSS contributors when they
| IPO'ed.
| gruturo wrote:
| Actually yes, we do. And I don't think this is excessively
| onerous. While not a legal requirement, it is a legitimate
| expectation, like having your "Good Morning" returned by
| someone, and we feel sad when this does not happen.
| rfrey wrote:
| There's a pretty bright line between "code they use" and
| "project they fork".
| [deleted]
| bdcravens wrote:
| No, but they do it typically: "Announcing AWS X, our
| implementation of {open source project}" (they do this with
| MongoDB, ActiveMQ, etc). The product mentioned here is more
| than just a managed version of the open source project; it
| is a major component however. (good example is Redshift,
| though when they announced it they barely mentioned the
| role Postgresql plays in that to be honest)
|
| https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/amazon-redshift-the-new-
| aws...
| jd_mongodb wrote:
| Import to realise that the DocumentDB (Amazon's MongoDB
| emulation) is not based on the MongoDB code base.
| wpietri wrote:
| The code may not be based on their code, but I don't see
| how you can have an emulation of X that isn't based on X.
| Imitation may be the sincerest form of flattery, but
| there's nothing stopping them from including some of the
| other forms. Plus a little gratitude, maybe.
| edoceo wrote:
| Arent Google and Oracle fighting the emulation X not
| based on X right now? (where X is Java API)
| scarface74 wrote:
| Every talk AWS does about Redshift they mention that it's
| based on Postgres. They tell you to download a Postgres
| driver to connect to it with any language besides Java
| for which a JDBC driver is provided.
| bdcravens wrote:
| I agree, but I was trying to be apples to apples and
| compare launch announcements, and when Redshift was
| announced, the discussion of Postgres was quite muted
| (admittedly several years ago, so their messaging may
| have shifted over time)
| atonse wrote:
| Well ... they tell you that not because they're bending
| over backwards to give postgres credit. They're doing it
| to tell you that the barrier of entry to this database is
| nearly 0 if you are already using Postgres.
| scarface74 wrote:
| You haven't watch the reInvent talks have you?
|
| But if you try to use the same schema design from a
| standard Postgres database and use the same query
| patterns, you will be sorely disappointed. Redshift uses
| a columnar store and is an OLAP database as opposed to
| Postgres which is a traditional database.
| bdcravens wrote:
| You can implement a columnar store in Postgres. (Of
| course there's more to Redshift than that)
|
| https://github.com/citusdata/cstore_fdw
| atonse wrote:
| No I totally get that. It is designed for data
| warehousing workloads rather than transactional. I'm
| saying that I have seen it more as a feature of "you use
| your existing tools and drivers" since it speaks the
| postgres wire protocol.
| candu wrote:
| ...yes? This is an automatable process these days, AWS /
| Amazon certainly have the resources to do it, and under
| many OSS licences it's a legal obligation to give
| attribution.
| simonw wrote:
| I read the replies and I didn't see that tweet - can you link
| to it?
|
| 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
| jasode wrote:
| _> If you read further down the Twitter thread you'll see
| others point out that AWS actually did acknowledge him in the
| release and thus his original rant isn't accurate. He
| acknowledges that later in the thread._
|
| 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.
|
| https://twitter.com/maxibanki/status/1317071448322789376
| whoknew1122 wrote:
| I'm not sure the timeline is important, other than to say
| HN posters shouldn't submit incendiary tweets as HN topics
| without some sort of corroboration. Especially when the
| person who tweets and posts on HN are the same.
|
| Here's the timeline I saw:
|
| 11:16 - A person blames AWS of something without additional
| context and understanding
|
| 11:23 - Presumably the same person posts on HN (to signal
| boost? farm karma from the anti-Amazon crowd sure to pop
| up? both?)
|
| Never:Never - OP apologizes for rousing the HN pitchfork
| mob
| barkingcat wrote:
| Hacker news never reads original posts either way, let
| alone followups to original posts :)
|
| I'll be downvoted, but that's a symptom of how poorly the
| audience of this site understands the issues at hand.
| (myself included)
| chuckSu wrote:
| This!
| cutemonster wrote:
| I read the original posts. In my experience, most people
| do.
| tingletech wrote:
| I read the comments first, to decide if I want to read
| the post.
|
| But I read the post before I comment.
| danmur wrote:
| What a delightful storm in a teacup :)
| duckerude wrote:
| They did the legal bare minimum in terms of attribution, but
| you're very unlikely to find it unless you're looking for it.
|
| I don't usually read through files like ~/.config/chromium/De
| fault/Extensions/bhdnlmmgiplmbcdmkkdfplenecpegfno/0.0.1_0/NOT
| ICE.txt (though perhaps I should).
| BurningFrog wrote:
| Still, as the original author, you can point to the
| attribution to prove your claim.
| prepend wrote:
| That's to be expected then, the legal bare minimum.
| madeofpalk wrote:
| Again, this conversation is not about the bare legal
| minimum. no one is disputing they have acted legally.
| prepend wrote:
| I'm not sure what the complaint is actually. It seems
| like the author just wants recognition. I'm not sure why
| he would want to expect anything other than what he
| specified in his project.
|
| I pointed out that the minimum is to be expected because
| I've seen it mentioned a few times that's all they did.
| Like the expectation is that they should have done more.
|
| It's a company forking a project, I would expect nothing
| else. It would be notable if he got a T-shirt or
| something.
| hartator wrote:
| > no one is disputing they have acted illegally
|
| Probably a typo. But I think you mean "no one is
| disputing they have acted legally".
| madeofpalk wrote:
| i meant to say something like "the dispute is not about
| the legality of their actions", but i missed it :)
| xtracto wrote:
| Funny, these kind of threads sound similarly to how some
| companies I have worked for sound when talking about
| working on Saturdays: Me: Do we have to
| come to work on Saturdays? Boss: You dont
| HAVE to... but you know, people come and do work to go
| the extra mile. Me: Ok, but If I don't come,
| there's no problem right? Boss: Well,
| no, there's no problem. But you know, there's lots of
| work and it is great when people push together.
| Me: Ok good, yeah I like my work and I like helping
| others but, I also appreciate my personal life. So... no
| problem if I decide not coming on Saturday right?
| Boss: MMhhgh yeah, no problem, but you know, we like to
| think you are COMMITED to our startup mission.
|
| And, then they get angry when I don't go on Saturdays. If
| you want me to go on Saturdays just put it in the darn
| contract and tell that as part of the terms when we are
| negotiating, then I'll walk out and we will all be happy.
|
| Same here, if the developer wanted something to happen,
| then he should have put it in the license. Otherwise,
| there's no reason to be whining that something that was
| NOT expected to happen (as per the license) did not
| happen.
| petercooper wrote:
| Sure, but this is a situation about social norms rather
| than passive aggressive employer behavior.
|
| Typically when a product or service is released, if it's
| built significantly upon something else, you at least
| throw out a quick acknowledgement. Sure, it's not the
| law, it's just polite/kind/whatever nice word you prefer
| to use.
|
| All sorts of communities have various 'norms' of this
| nature which you are totally entitled to ignore but that
| doesn't mean they're not there.
| BeetleB wrote:
| > Sure, but this is a situation about social norms rather
| than passive aggressive employer behavior.
|
| Every time I come across a thread - on any forum - where
| people are educating others that something is a social
| norm, it is because it is not. They merely want it to be.
|
| If you have a good number of people disagreeing on it,
| take it as a humble suggestion that norms differ across
| geos, industries, culture, etc. Don't insist on it,
| because it will come across as an imposition.
|
| Unrelated to the content in my comment above, I look at
| this from the same lens I look at products in my
| engineering world. We don't find a need to credit Claude
| Shannon, John Von Neumann, Tony Hoare, etc in all our
| products. I find this to be OK.
| mlyle wrote:
| So you're saying the only courtesies we should render to
| others in life are ones that we're duty-bound by license
| agreements or other contracts to give?
|
| Out with social norms and niceties, and in with black
| letter law?
|
| I don't want to legally demand a specific
| acknowledgement; I know that this can have unintended
| consequences and greatly complicates adoption.
|
| Also: If my stuff is used at the periphery of something
| you're doing, I don't really care. On the other hand, if
| you get to market by largely just repackaging what I've
| made, it seems that by social norms I'm due a hat tip,
| whether or not it's legally demanded.
| meddlepal wrote:
| > So you're saying the only courtesies we should render
| to others in life are ones that we're duty-bound by
| license agreements or other contracts to give?
|
| Nothing you do for your employer as part of work should
| be considered "courtesy" or a "social nicety".
| mlyle wrote:
| The "something you do for your employer as part of work"
| was a strawman and doesn't relate to what we're talking
| about. We're talking about whether it meets social norms
| to take open source work, launch it as the core piece of
| a product, and do the absolute minimum legally required
| acknowledgment.
| craftinator wrote:
| Yeah, as long as my company will double my pay when I ask
| for it as a courtesy, I'll come in on my days off as a
| courtesy. Tit tat
| mlyle wrote:
| The employer thing is a strawman here; the subject of the
| article is AWS forking and launching a product with
| minimal (but legal) attribution. I didn't argue
| -anything- about the employer case, staying on topic to
| AWS's behavior.
| LocalH wrote:
| I think they're bemoaning the fact that many employers
| will couch it in terms of _courtesy_ yet also claim the
| right to be _angry_ if you don't go above what is
| required. It should be encouraged to do more than
| required, yes. But it shouldn't be _punishable_ if you
| don't.
| [deleted]
| didibus wrote:
| > So you're saying the only courtesies we should render
| to others in life are ones that we're duty-bound by
| license agreements or other contracts to give?
|
| Isn't that the whole point behind the rule of law and the
| civil society?
|
| Anything that isn't well understood or known in advance
| of someone engaging in an activity, and then later faces
| unfair retribution because apparently they didn't do what
| wasn't told to them that needed be done, or did something
| that wasn't told to them shouldn't be done.
|
| All these "social norm" sounds like guilt trip and power
| grabs to me. You did something you said was free and that
| you were giving it to me no string attached, then you
| come back and guilt trip me saying that there were in
| fact strings attached and that you expected things in
| return.
|
| Now, yes I understand that maybe when you said hey this
| is open source with Apache license, you had in mind an
| audience of students, or one man startups, or hobbyist,
| or amateurs, and hadn't really thought if it applied to
| big corps. And I actually wonder how the courts normally
| handle this, when someone who put the conditions forward
| first was in a position where they couldn't have
| anticipated the event and thus couldn't have pre-
| conditioned it. I'm not too sure how to handle it myself,
| but here I'm guessing is a lesson to learn for others,
| choose your license carefully, think about the various
| possibility.
| mlyle wrote:
| > Anything that isn't well understood or known in advance
| of someone engaging in an activity, and then later faces
| unfair retribution because apparently they didn't do what
| wasn't told to them that needed be done, or did something
| that wasn't told to them shouldn't be done.
|
| Your argument self-contradicts. You assert, broadly, if
| it's legal it's OK. The "unfair retribution" of people
| getting annoyed about it and complaining is also legal,
| so that should be OK, too. :P
|
| > Now, yes I understand that maybe when you said hey this
| is open source with Apache license, you had in mind an
| audience of students, or one man startups, or hobbyist,
| or amateurs, and hadn't really thought if it applied to
| big corps.
|
| Nah, when I said "Apache License", I meant that legal
| license. But that doesn't mean doing some things that
| effectively cost nothing, that exceed the license
| requirements, aren't socially customary.
|
| There's no law that says you have to say "thank you" when
| someone renders you a service or has made something that
| makes your life easier or lets you make a bunch of money,
| but if you stand on legal grounds to avoid saying
| "thanks" you might be a dick, and people might call you
| out for being a dick.
| marcus_holmes wrote:
| I worked for a financial organisation in Dublin for a
| while back in the 90's. Best attitude to this stuff I
| have experienced:
|
| You have 8 hours to do your work in. If you need more
| than that then you're either slacking off or incompetent.
| If you've been given more than 8 hours work to do then
| that's a scheduling problem you need to take up with your
| manager.
|
| Everyone worked their arses off all day, and at 5pm the
| entire office went to the pub to socialise. Some only
| stayed for a short time then went home. Others stayed on
| for hours. But staying in the office after 5pm was not
| acceptable.
|
| As a developer, it was great. Interruptions were always
| pertinent, because all the socialising happened in the
| pub. I could code in peace for ~8 hours, which tbh is
| about my limit anyway, after that my quality goes
| downhill fast. And then we all hung out together. Being a
| developer who can't do the social thing in work hours
| with losing massive time to context switching wasn't a
| social handicap, for once.
| tylerhou wrote:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ChQK8j6so8
| mynegation wrote:
| Ah beat me to it! )) This movie was an instant classic.
| arbitrage wrote:
| I had a professor, once, who chewed me out for submitting
| work at the deadline.
|
| I told them that if they wanted me to submit it on
| Thursday, they shouldn't've set the boundary for Friday
| at midnight. That didn't go over too well.
| bonoboTP wrote:
| Interesting cultural differences. In other places if you
| submit earlier than the deadline they assume you didn't
| care about it enough to use all available time to make it
| as good as possible.
| inopinatus wrote:
| As a range or interval specifier, many (most?) non-
| programmers will assume the interpretation of "midnight"
| that favours them in any subsequent dispute.
|
| In practice this often means that "from midnight on
| Monday to midnight on Tuesday" is a 48-hour interval so
| far as consumers are concerned. I recommend advertising
| things like cut-off times as "11:59pm" and friends, when
| possible.
|
| Also, my time formatter turns "12:00" into "12 noon"
| following weary experience of people who confuse 12:00
| with midnight.
| a1369209993 wrote:
| > In practice this often means that "from midnight on
| Monday to midnight on Tuesday" is a 48-hour interval so
| far as consumers are concerned.
|
| I generally insist on midnight being 0:00 or 24:00 for
| much the same reasons.
| gus_massa wrote:
| In a somewhat similar scenario, we had some discussions
| about what "Friday midnight" means. So just to be super
| clear, we finally put "Thursday, 11pm".
| JoeAltmaier wrote:
| I'm surprised. A professor objected to a student adhering
| to the rules pedantically? What's University for!
| [deleted]
| serguzest wrote:
| hi! I want to work for amazon, can you forward my resume to
| your boss please?
| serguzest wrote:
| negative feedbackers, please beware this is a sarcastic
| comment. I think the guy was manipulating the thread.
| thayne wrote:
| Ah, yes, he is acknowledged in a text file that almost no one
| will read.
|
| 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?
| franklampard wrote:
| Can you show me an example of any other project released
| from FAANG doing that? Curious what the expectations are.
| pwdisswordfish4 wrote:
| Hell, can you show an example from the author's own
| company? That company's about page has a blurb on
| contributing back to open source that seems to be on par
| with what Amazon does to contribute to open source, and
| the author is sponsoring 4 people on GitHub, but where
| are the loud proclamations that people are clamoring for
| in this thread? Whose shoulders are being stood on there?
| Is checklyhq.com really running a SaaS offering without
| benefiting from many, _many_ more people than the outward
| stance suggests?
|
| This whole thing is very reminiscent of the Occupy Wall
| Street movement. People are very sensitive to the
| injustices they perceive themselves as having to endure
| especially in relation to those wealthier than them. But
| where's the willingness to jump out of local scope and
| apply the same principle globally (and reflexively)? It
| seems to be absent.
| Rebelgecko wrote:
| There's probably oodles. Off the top of my head, there's
| Apple's web page for X11. Except for a spinal tap joke,
| the whole first section of the page was devoted to the
| acknowledgement that they were building on top of OSS
| from XFree86.
| bawolff wrote:
| I disagree, he posted a rant on twitter complaining about
| amazons behaviour. Even if he admits that its not technically
| required, he is still generatig negative press for someone
| legitamently exercising their rights under the open source
| license he used.
|
| 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
| systemvoltage wrote:
| > He's not complaining
|
| How is he not complaining. He totally is.
| jmholla wrote:
| That's completely out of context. The full quote 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.
| systemvoltage wrote:
| I see the distinction, thanks.
|
| I find this entire thread absurd though...if the person
| wanted to get fair credit, they should have used a
| different license. It's like saying "Hey, totally ok to
| have a beer from my fridge. But I'd _really_ _really_ plead
| you to drop in a buck... but only if you wish though. But I
| highly recommend it. It would be shame if you don 't. Most
| people don't want to be shamed do they?"
|
| Just be straight forward and put that in the license.
| Otherwise, it is truly optional and should be treated as
| such.
|
| As much as I dislike having trillion dollar corporation not
| give a credit, that's why we have licenses.
| dekhn wrote:
| The original BSD license specifically had a clause that
| required companies including licensed code to acknowledge it in
| their advertising material.
| LoSboccacc wrote:
| ...you can just add a clause
|
| E:
|
| who downvoted this, care to explain? have you ever eard of the
| jslint license? you can add the fuck you want to one's software
| terms
| tomrod wrote:
| Just like they could have added the owner's name.
| LoSboccacc wrote:
| no? why would they? they are complying with everything dude
| asked for and mind reading is not in mandatory training as
| of yet.
|
| if you want a nod if used as a part of a software, just add
| it!
| tomrod wrote:
| It's good practice to cite your sources. Even if you're
| strictly legal, being ethical doesn't hurt.
| RankingMember wrote:
| It seems they did, just in a not obvious place. The thing
| with legal documents is that, if it's not in the
| document, you can't expect it to be adhered to. This gets
| hairy when opposing parties have different ideas of what
| "norms" are, aka "unspoken/unwritten expectations", as we
| see here.
| tomrod wrote:
| I get that, and don't disagree.
| emiliobumachar wrote:
| I did not downvote, but license proliferation is a big
| problem in free software. People cannot combine software with
| incompatible licenses.
| LoSboccacc wrote:
| > People cannot combine software with incompatible
| licenses.
|
| well yeah, that the point, you either demand a nod, or suck
| it up and stop asking things that weren't in the license
| paulcole wrote:
| > when you're a commercial enterprise making a splashy product
| announcement"
|
| Ah yes, this ironclad legalese.
| shawnz wrote:
| Perhaps that's why such a clause wasn't added to the license?
| numlock86 wrote:
| > There are some replies in this thread that misunderstood the
| content of Tim Nolet's twitter post.
|
| > [...] (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.
| hashkb wrote:
| Fear of bad PR is the most effective way to motivate larger
| American companies.
| rbanffy wrote:
| How well is that working for Amazon warehouse workers?
| numlock86 wrote:
| Motivate them for what, though? Fixing your license issues?
| Where is the bad PR?
|
| Edit: Those downvotes are not really giving me answers.
| Anyone care to explain the issue?
| shawnz wrote:
| Motivate them to be mindful of the shoulders they stand
| on. The bad PR is that this at-a-glance anti-Amazon post
| is at the top of a popular tech forum.
| numlock86 wrote:
| > Motivate them to be mindful of the shoulders they stand
| on.
|
| What makes you believe they are not? Or rather, what do
| you think they are apparently obligated to do? What's the
| issue here?
|
| > The bad PR is that this at-a-glance anti-Amazon post is
| at the top of a popular tech forum.
|
| I don't see the anti-Amazon part. What I do see is a
| developer that either has a license issue or simply wants
| some attention.
| shawnz wrote:
| > What makes you believe they are not?
|
| The OP seems to be disappointed with how they handled it,
| and an Amazon agent even replied to agree and apologize.
| Plus, this is not the first time that people have
| reported similar feelings about Amazon's lack of
| appreciation for the permissive open source code they
| use.
|
| > what do you think they are apparently obligated to do?
|
| I don't know exactly, but I think it starts with making
| efforts to maintain good relationships with the open
| source community members who work for free to enable
| Amazon's (and others) products to exist. Regardless of
| whether they explicitly demand it up front.
| pmontra wrote:
| Some Creative Commons by Attribution license? Maybe it's not an
| OSS license (I didn't check) but it should work.
| tokai wrote:
| Creative Commons recommend against using the cc licenses for
| code. Recommending using the gnu licenses instead.
| duckerude wrote:
| Most FOSS licenses require attribution, including the one
| used here. The issue is that attribution doesn't have to be
| very prominent.
| matthewaveryusa wrote:
| I really don't understand this reasoning of "there's not a
| license" Take an existing one you like and amend whatever you
| want to it.
| duckerude wrote:
| Rolling your own license isn't trivial. You could end up with
| something that nobody wants to touch because the legal
| implications are unclear, or something that's unenforceable,
| or both.
|
| Somewhat relevant:
| https://opensource.google/docs/thirdparty/licenses/#wtfpl-
| no...
| nitrogen wrote:
| IIRC the GPL, for example, is itself covered by copyright and
| doesn't permit modification of its own text.
| matthewaveryusa wrote:
| That is super interesting, I was actually thinking about it
| as I was writing that response. Isn't that non-enforceable?
| As in, if you write a legal document, and then make that
| document law, and then copyright it, it would mean that you
| wouldn't be able to modify the law without breaching
| copyright law. Is this really true and enforceable?
| lwh wrote:
| You can modify or add extra terms to the GPL, they even
| have templates: https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-
| faq.en.html#GPLIncompatible...
|
| Totem has an example https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/totem
| /-/blob/b4050524d6cd961b...
| garmaine wrote:
| You cannot copyright a license.
| mkl wrote:
| A license is a written document, so like any other
| document, it is protected by copyright law. See e.g.
| https://law.stackexchange.com/questions/55720/is-it-
| legal-to... and
| https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/4543/is-
| the-m...
| duckerude wrote:
| You're allowed to modify it as long as you make it very
| clear that the new license is distinct from the old one:
| https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#ModifyGPL
| sequoia wrote:
| The issue is wanting to have it both ways.
|
| - 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?
| kemitche wrote:
| There is, and will always be, a gap between what is strictly
| allowed/legal, and what is considered ethical/courteous.
|
| 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.
| sequoia wrote:
| Fair enough. I just don't know if it makes sense to expect
| tech companies operate with any values besides making
| money. That's why I say "don't ask or beg them to be
| courteous, _force_ them to either be courteous or ' _don
| 't use my code_', which a license can do."
|
| Frog & scorpion don'cha know.
|
| The other thing that annoys is the fact that the
| permissiveness of the license is precisely why AWS used it,
| probably part of why it's popular, why he can tweet about
| it & build his brand etc. The author has and continues to
| benefit from the permissiveness of the license. To enjoy
| the upside of permissive but complain that the downside
| isn't fair comes off as a bit self-serving.
| Gehinnn wrote:
| AWS did wrong by being so wealthy. They could have done
| better easily.
|
| 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.
| SolarNet wrote:
| I mean this point exactly (though I come at from the other
| side). If one wishes a big business to respect their commons
| then bite the bullet and use the "restrictive" (they are in
| fact freedom guaranteeing) commons protecting licenses (like
| AGPL) be radical. If one takes issue with the business
| practices of big business don't gently shove back with social
| expectations and a sound bite here and there, draw the hard
| line in the sand.
| Zenbit_UX wrote:
| > 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?
|
| 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._
| sequoia wrote:
| https://web.archive.org/web/20090717023402/https://zedshaw.
| c...
|
| The answer you're looking for this guy wrote up 10+ years
| ago: If you don't like the way people are using your work,
| release your next work under a different license that more
| closely matches what you want. Learn from the mistake &
| don't make it again.
|
| Maybe I'm autistic (the diagnostic criteria are very fuzzy
| around the edges) but I'm not sure what that has to do with
| my argument.
| Gehinnn wrote:
| We are still humans with values. I, and I guess you too,
| don't want to live in a world where everyone just does
| their bare minimum to fulfill the law.
|
| The fair usage principle can create much more value than
| complex and often unnecessary strict regulations.
|
| I guess the author would not have complained if a small
| company had done what aws did just to stay afloat.
| jgowdy wrote:
| > 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".
|
| That's called the old BSD 4 clause license. Now you know.
|
| https://spdx.org/licenses/BSD-4-Clause.html
| ksec wrote:
| Yes I remember there was a similar scenario with Microsoft as
| well.
|
| > 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
| varispeed wrote:
| Oh the good old companies paying in exposure... If you make a
| profit from using someone else software you should pay them
| (plus appropriate tax) regardless of the software license.
| jaywalk wrote:
| If someone wants to get paid by people who profit off their
| software, they should license it in a way that requires
| that. Otherwise, tough luck.
| varispeed wrote:
| This is a loophole that allows big companies to avoid
| hiring engineers and paying right tax. Not sure why would
| you support this?
| toast0 wrote:
| All of my enduring open source contributions have been
| made while employed by a big(ish) company. I went through
| the effort to get them upstreamed so other people
| wouldn't have to make the same effort to debug and fix
| the same issues. Does that enable other companies to
| avoid hiring engineers to do the same work? Maybe, but it
| also enables everyone to benefit from things working just
| a bit better.
|
| I don't need a royalty from my fixes, I was compensated
| for my time. I don't even care about a credit, but I
| understand some do.
| tzs wrote:
| It's not a loophole. A loophole is when you have some
| case or situation not covered by the rules allowing
| someone to get away with something that the rules were
| not meant to allow.
|
| E.g., a company arranging for its shareholders to be able
| to report dividends as capital gains rather than ordinary
| income by doing a fractional stock split followed by a
| mandatory buyback instead of declaring a dividend, with
| the split/buyback designed so that each shareholder ends
| up with exactly the same percentage ownership they had
| before and with cash equal to the exact amount that would
| have been otherwise distributed as a dividend [1], that's
| a loophole.
|
| An author picking an open source license that
| _specifically and intentionally_ allows anyone to use
| their software and make money from it without having to
| give the author anything is not a loophole.
|
| [1] Yes, this actually happened around 100 years ago. The
| rules on buybacks were changed to fix it. But them some
| legitimate cases of buybacks that should have been
| capital gains became ordinary income, so more fixes were
| needed. The result is that what once needed at most a
| line in the tax code, if it even needed mention at all,
| became several paragraphs. This is why we do not have a
| small, simple tax code--there is a massive incentive for
| people to find even the tiniest loophole and exploit it,
| and so you end up with multiple paragraphs for things you
| at first would think could be done in a sentence. (And
| don't say a flat tax would help...almost all of the
| complexity in the tax code is in determining _what_ gets
| taxes, not how much the tax is once you have figured out
| the what).
| karolist wrote:
| Am I crazy for wanting a license that prohibits the free
| use of a project by mega-corps? "If you're a company
| valued > $XXX usage of this code is prohibited".
|
| I guess I can see OSS as a "free food" stall. Almost
| everyone can have a bite but I'm not fine with
| billionaires coming in to steal the recipes. They already
| have the means to increase their wealth efficiently,
| society would have much benefit if these mechanisms of
| wealth increase involved giving some of it back.
| segfaultbuserr wrote:
| Congratulations, you've just reinvented the _original_ BSD-4
| license! It included what was called the "obnoxious
| advertising clause".
|
| > _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.)
| rbanffy wrote:
| Maybe BSD4 is a good license in this case. I'd prefer AGPL,
| but then AWS would probably just avoid it.
| segfaultbuserr wrote:
| The advertising clause is inherently problematic to
| integrators, distributions, and packagers, which are an
| important part of the community. For a distribution,
| having to acknowledge 1,000+ authors in all promotional
| materials is unrealistic. Worse, it won't be a problem
| initially, but only after most people had noticed this
| trend: they would want their acknowledgements too, and
| everyone would start adding advertising clauses, in the
| end - everyone spams all posters with credit and nobody
| gains any notability, it's kind of a tragedy of the
| commons. The only way to stop this problem is explicitly
| discouraging everyone from using it.
|
| A idea is to reword and relax this license: Similar to
| LGPL, you can skip the acknowledgement if it's used in an
| unmodified form. But it doesn't really solve the problem
| - if the original project has been forked by the
| community, the exception becomes useless again. The next
| problem is that, it doesn't really cover all cases - in a
| previous incident involved Microsoft, Microsoft didn't
| even use a single line of the original code at all, it
| was just an inspiration from its framework, and the
| author was upset for not receiving any acknowledgement...
| Another idea is using AGPL's approach and targets cloud
| providers only, but still, it doesn't cover all the cases
| here.
|
| I'm not sure whether using copyright to require
| acknowledgement is a good idea after all. In the
| academia, copyright and credit/attribution are two
| entirely independent process. The credit is not a legal
| matter, but simply a form of code of conduct and informal
| politeness. Perhaps promoting a code of conduct for
| acknowledgement in the industry regarding the use of FOSS
| could work better.
| joseluisq wrote:
| Ok, we should fork at convenience without taking care how was
| made something. Because "the company" only takes care on your
| LICENSE file and fu.. the maintainers or collaborators on it.
| If we always come with excuses like "Oh, wait but it's not
| specified somewhere I can copy, appropriate it and sell it as
| mine". Fu..! Because looks like we need to __protect* our self
| of companies instead of trust them. So OSS doesn 't make sense.
| So now turns out that there are no people managing decisions
| like this. Come on, credits are not a fu..ing problem and are
| free of cost!
| saxonww wrote:
| The original 4-clause BSD had an advertising clause that is
| basically what you're asking for. It was considered
| impractical.
| _verandaguy wrote:
| I believe CC-BY[0] covers this. Worth noting that CC is more of
| a generalist license than software, though, so you may not have
| _as_ fine-grained control as with BSD /GPL/MIT etc.
| [0] https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/
| riffraff wrote:
| would CC-BY require that the licensed work get mentioned in
| _the product announcement_ ?
|
| It seems to me it would just require mentioning it in some
| CREDITS.txt or whatever, which the other lincenses also do.
| _verandaguy wrote:
| Good catch. I think you could get somewhat around this by
| running a CC-BY-SA, which requires that Amazon disclose the
| source of their forked product, which in turn would include
| a credit.
| amanzi wrote:
| To be fair, in a follow up tweet he says, "...I'm not mad, that
| would be hypocritical..." He knows that Amazon are playing within
| the rules.
| [deleted]
| lolsal wrote:
| This is the other side of the open-source coin in my opinion. The
| freedom to fork and do your own thing is great when you're
| fighting The Man (somehow) but it seems different when The Man
| does it to you or one of your projects.
|
| I personally am of the opinion that AWS doesn't own the author
| anything, even acknowledgement.
| Ensorceled wrote:
| Is what AWS did legal? Yes. Ethical? Meh. Rude? Yes. Against the
| spirit of OSS? Hell yeah.
|
| Is the author calling them out fair. Yes.
|
| Also fair, me assuming everybody defending AWS here is a terrible
| person.
| rakah wrote:
| I agree. I'm not even sure I understand defending AWS here from
| a purely capitalist perspective. When a large company gives
| thanks to a open source developer they are encouraging that
| developer to continue contributing. That could possibly benefit
| the company in the future - to act otherwise doesn't seem to
| serve their own interests very well.
| cmaker10 wrote:
| Could everyone take a moment here and reflect on their hostile
| attitude towards an open source author who just wants to be
| treated fairly (in a moral sense)?
|
| My guess is that none of the people who are lecturing and
| gloating have ever written anything substantial. Shame on you.
| zajio1am wrote:
| People do not like being publicly shamed for not adhering to
| some vague and not-generally-accepted obligation.
| pjmlp wrote:
| I have, but all of it was behind commercial licenses, because
| there is idealism and then there is the real world.
|
| As for the author, it sucks, but companies, moral and law,
| don't stand on the same side of the balance.
| johncena33 wrote:
| The issue here is HN loves Amazon. That's why you are seeing
| the hostility. If it was Google doing that, I can guarantee you
| the HN response would be radically different.
| 08-15 wrote:
| He used a permissive license so that everyone, including
| Amazon, can use his code without any strings attached.
| Presumably because he wants his software to spread far and
| wide. This is the typically stated reason why people use
| permissive licenses, isn't it?
|
| Therefore, shouldn't _he_ be thanking _Amazon_ for spreading
| his software?
| franklampard wrote:
| Acknowledgment is included also. He probably expects an
| blogpost from AWS thanking him specifically?
|
| That's pretty much unrealistic, given how many pieces of oss
| a project uses.
| zelly wrote:
| Not hostile.
|
| 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.
| lolsal wrote:
| Thank you for saying what I could not articulate.
| Chris2048 wrote:
| Is describing people who disagree with you as "[never] have
| ever written anything substantial" a fair treatment?
|
| You're basically implying people who do not subscribe to you
| philosophy as lazy and/or unproductive.
| asdasdasdas5453 wrote:
| I am baffled by the comments as well.
| hackerfromthefu wrote:
| Yeah part of the social contract for open source is people get
| appreciation, respect, and visibility in exchange for their
| contributions ..
| whatsmyusername wrote:
| The license does not require that.
| [deleted]
| fourseventy wrote:
| says who?
| franklampard wrote:
| > open source author who just wants to be treated fairly
|
| 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.
| swazzy wrote:
| Response from AWS:
| https://twitter.com/mjasay/status/1317084448119169024?s=21
| cute_boi wrote:
| they are like every body uses opensource we too used ........
| varispeed wrote:
| By law you need to pay for accepted work at least the minimum
| wage. My question is whether AWS is breaking the law by
| appropriating someone else work without payment? Or do you think
| something like this should be regulated? I see this as a
| loophole, where companies can gain useful projects without having
| to pay wages.
| FirstLvR wrote:
| what the fork
| [deleted]
| masukomi wrote:
| I really wish, that when COs like Amazon decided to productize a
| thing they either offered the core developer(s) enough $ to work
| on it full time (if they wanted) or a job to do that with a
| guarantee that as long as it was a product, and they wanted to
| work on it, they'd be allowed to continue. Problem with offering
| job is the likelyhood of getting redirected to some other
| unrelated work.
|
| 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.
| coddle-hark wrote:
| On the other hand, I don't write FOSS in the hopes that some
| corporate overlord will eventually recognise my work and
| essentially buy the project from me with a job offer. I write
| FOSS because fuck you I have a computer and an internet
| connection and I'm going to do whatever I want. If you want to
| fork it, go ahead, but I'll be damned if I'm going to spend my
| time (paid or unpaid) writing features that only make sense to
| Amazon.
| SquishyPanda23 wrote:
| > 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.
| bluejekyll wrote:
| The original tweet (as I understood it) wasn't complaining
| about this in a legal sense. They know the license allows
| this. They were complaining from a place of asking for a
| little respect and acknowledgement.
|
| 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.
| staticassertion wrote:
| And companies _still_ get chastized constantly on HN for not
| being free enough. Open core? Not free enough. Common clause?
| Not free enough. I 've been seeing it here for years.
| sslayer wrote:
| Everyone hates capitalism particularly when they fail to
| capitalize on it.
| wussboy wrote:
| That's fantastic. Did you come up with that?
| dclowd9901 wrote:
| You misunderstand what happened. Some open source software
| still had more restrictive licensing, but most corporations
| opted not to use it, often because they simply couldn't and
| still operate legally, and thus, the software was less
| supported and less used software died out.
|
| 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.
| [deleted]
| lenkite wrote:
| The best strategy for OSS is to use copyleft licenses or EPL.
| eecc wrote:
| Bravo, that's more or less the TL;DR of all BSD, GPL/Apache
| endless flame.
|
| I love how these reckonings and syntheses are coming.
| toyg wrote:
| Sadly, every generation has to re-learn that the scorpion
| can't help itself from stinging.
| ketzo wrote:
| Open source software is something that has no meaningfully
| similar parallel in any other industry, and that has created
| untold billions (trillions?) of value across the world while
| _also_ allowing literally anyone to carve out a piece of that
| value.
|
| 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.
| new_realist wrote:
| Patents and copyright are the parallels in other
| industries, although they compensate inventors more.
| Eventually it all goes into the public domain.
| ketzo wrote:
| But GE isn't paying engineers to put out new lightbulb
| filament designs to the public (and other companies).
|
| Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft, and many, many other
| companies are _literally_ building tools for their
| competitors.
|
| That's so outside the realm of possibility in any other
| industry that a copyright lawyer (or executive) in any
| heavily-patented field would laugh you out of their
| office for suggesting something like that.
| hoopleheaded wrote:
| This happens all the time across all sorts of industries.
| Where do you think things like ASTM standards come from?
| Companies pay people to participate in developing open
| standards that benefit themselves as well as their
| competitors.
| phreack wrote:
| That 'eventually' means several lifetimes in practice so
| it's effectively non-existant.
| kortilla wrote:
| It's open source, if you're mad a company used the software
| in a way you don't like, you're not really getting it.
| brainless wrote:
| You are either the one who was in the open source
| movement, in which case I will hold my silence. Else I
| will say you do not know that open source was started
| when on-premise was a thing. How do you know how open
| source would have started now in the era of cloud?
| kortilla wrote:
| I have worked on lots of open source software with the
| full intent of just putting the code out there to allow
| others to use as they see fit. Even if one person uses it
| to save them or their business time, it's achieved its
| goal.
|
| If other people contribute back, great. If I get credit,
| great. But those are not the motivations when you put up
| something like a BSD license. Licenses mean things so you
| need to choose a restrictive license if you get your
| feelings hurt when people use your software in a way you
| don't like.
| lscotte wrote:
| Exactly. Don't use an open ended license and then
| complain about it. If you want to restrict use, then
| license it appropriately. Very simple and obvious.
| cacois wrote:
| Exactly. Don't complain about someone being a jerk to you
| if you didn't get a restraining order against them. If
| you want to restrict them interacting with you, get a
| restraining order. Very simple and obvious.
| travisjungroth wrote:
| You're saying that people should lean entirely on the
| law. It's pretty reasonable to have some set of behaviors
| that you're willing to legally allow but also will
| complain about. It's not like you can carve these things
| out perfectly. You're going to either be over-permissive
| and have some stuff you don't want happen, or be under-
| permissive and restrict behaviors you're fine with.
|
| To say "if you want to restrict use, then license
| appropriately" is to push heavily towards everyone using
| more restrictive licenses.
| ketzo wrote:
| There's a difference between what is legally required and
| the greater good. Obviously, no one involved in this post
| is guilty of any literal crime. As you're suggesting, the
| license is the license.
|
| But OSS is a fragile and wonderful thing, and an entity
| with the resources and clout of AWS would (at least in my
| opinion) do well to tend that garden rather than strip it
| bare.
| kortilla wrote:
| This isn't "stripping it bare". Nothing is being taken
| away from the author nor is anything preventing the
| author or original contributors from continuing to work.
|
| That's the whole point of the license. You're putting
| code out there for others to use _however they want_.
|
| This isn't even about legal requirement vs intent. If you
| put up a super permissive license, you are making the
| intent very clear that people can do whatever they want
| with it.
|
| The lack of obligation, both legal and societal, of using
| open source software is what makes it so useful and lets
| the whole ecosystem flourish.
|
| If your in open source for glory and getting monetary or
| promotional credit for your work, you're doing it for the
| wrong reason.
| cacois wrote:
| Think of it this way - often when people become extremely
| wealthy, they turn to philanthropy. Because they want to
| give back. If someone becomes ridiculously wealthy and
| gives nothing back, we as a society tend to think poorly
| of them. Why? Because they are extremely fortunate and
| highly successful - and they could so easily help others
| without any negative impact to themselves. That ease
| makes us unhappy with them _not_ giving back. Because in
| their particular circumstance, we generally consider it
| _right_ to use their resources help others. Not required,
| but right.
|
| Same thing with a company like Amazon. They are
| enormously wealthy. So we look poorly on them when they
| don't give back to those bringing them even more wealth.
| Because they easily could. Because it wouldn't hurt them
| at all. Because it is right.
| momokoko wrote:
| I would disagree in the specific case of AWS.
|
| 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
| fractionalhare wrote:
| _> 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._
|
| I don't think your claim about Amazon is true. But even if
| it is, it's not relevant. None of the OSI licenses require
| improvements to be contributed back to the original
| project. The most restrictive of them simply requires
| improvements to be open to the user.
|
| The intention of open source licenses was never to force
| those who redistribute the software to improve on it. It
| was to provide end users with the freedom to be able to do
| that themselves, by distributing the improvements as well.
|
| It's unfortunate that licenses from a generation ago don't
| adequately cover all the nuance of cloud computing. But the
| reality is that open source licenses were never about
| preventing companies from profiting at the expense of
| original developers. They were about user freedom. If
| you're unhappy with the way a company is using the software
| you open sourced, that is a sign you weren't prepared to
| commit to what open source means, philosophically.
|
| Something like the AGPL would be preferable, if also more
| controversial. Then you'd also have a peanut gallery of
| people telling you your software is "source available"
| instead of open source.
| tsimionescu wrote:
| > The intention of open source licenses was never to
| force those who redistribute the software to improve on
| it. It was to provide end users with the freedom to be
| able to do that themselves, by distributing the
| improvements as well.
|
| Perhaps that was the intentions of the license creators,
| but famously Linus for example chose the GPL license
| precisely as a quid pro quo - I give you code for free,
| you give me back code for free.
| ddalex wrote:
| And this projects doesn't use GPL, uses Apache. So why do
| the authors expect something back !?
| mettamage wrote:
| What about Intel using Minix and not giving attribution to
| Tanenbaum?
| jeena wrote:
| No they are not contributing. I was working at a big german
| car maker for the last 5 years and fighting with them so
| they would allow the devs to upstream all the patches they
| made just so we would not need to maintain those patches,
| so it would be cheaper for them. But after 5 years there
| was still no process for any dev to do that.
| rmrfstar wrote:
| "They know only the rules of a generation of self-seekers.
| They have no vision, and when there is no vision the people
| perish.
|
| 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]
|
| [1] https://avalon.law.yale.edu/20th_century/froos1.asp
| LeifCarrotson wrote:
| It's painful to contrast FDR's thoughts on finance with
| what we heard last night:
|
| > "Okay, first of all, let me answer. What they did is
| illegal, number one. Also, the numbers are all wrong, with
| the numbers they released. And just so you understand, when
| you have a lot of real estate, I have real estate, you know
| a lot of it. Okay? Right down the road, Doral, big stuff,
| great stuff. When I decided to run, I'm very underlevered,
| fortunately, but I'm very underlevered. I have a very, very
| small percentage of debt compared. In fact, some of it, I
| did as favors to institutions that wanted to loan me money.
| $400 million compared to the assets that I have, all of
| these great properties all over the world, and frankly, The
| Bank of America building in San Francisco. I don't love
| what's happening to San Francisco. 1290 Avenue of the
| Americas, one of the biggest office buildings."
|
| [1] https://www.rev.com/transcript-
| editor/shared/HJCYu2w66p28wT2...
| drevil-v2 wrote:
| I think that is an unfair comparison. Being articulate
| does not does not imply any other quality than just being
| articulate.
|
| Back in the day I thought Obama was amazing. He was
| articulate and considered in his manner of speech. Then
| we hearing about the drone strikes with heavy collateral
| damage. And then Snowden came out and told us how Obama
| administration had put in place all the necessary
| infrastructure for a surveillance state. And then he put
| in place Title XI and kangaroo courts at Universities to
| completely undermine the core tenet of our legal system
| "Innocent until proven guilty".
|
| Articulate does not equal morality or justice or
| fairness. It certainly did not with Obama.
| thelittlenag wrote:
| > Obama administration had put in place all the necessary
| infrastructure for a surveillance state
|
| I do not think that is accurate. The Obama administration
| sustained the growth from the previous administration. I
| do wish they had curtailed this growth, but c'est la vie.
| medium_burrito wrote:
| That's not the whole picture- the giant surveillance
| program was never going to be killed.
|
| Just give it different names each time congress finds
| out- Total Information Awareness, Carnivore (slightly
| different system, head of same hydra), etc.
| [deleted]
| dheera wrote:
| Not only that, but there is no mention of the original author
| on their press release. All they say is "Amazon launches
| CloudWatch Synthetics Recorder".
|
| 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.
| pbhjpbhj wrote:
| Surely the answer is "of course you can", just tack on "all
| media mentions must have an approved attribution without
| which all license terms are null and void" to any license and
| viola!?
| dheera wrote:
| It would be nice if that were incorporated into a well-
| known, publicized, and lawyer-vetted license.
|
| The problem is if I tack it on myself, nobody will ever
| touch or use my code even in the ways I want them to,
| because people fear obscure licenses if they don't have
| lawyers.
|
| If I release code as GPL, BSD, MIT, Apache, people will use
| it without second thoughts. IF I release code as "BSD with
| modifications" people will look at it with suspect eyes.
|
| The effect I want to have is NOT to prevent large companies
| from using my code. In fact I want to encourage them to use
| it, but to also publicly mention me along with its use,
| which would be very valuable to career-building and job
| seeking. That way, when writers of open source code aren't
| offered jobs by the companies that use that code, at least
| they gain high visibility for other companies to want to
| hire them.
| [deleted]
| andylynch wrote:
| The author (Tim) appears to be in Germany; under German
| copyright law he in principle has the moral right to be
| identified as the author of any computer program he writes,
| just as it if were a book or piece of music.
|
| 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?
| )
| gowld wrote:
| That's like the old "BSD License Advertising Clause"
| nautilus12 wrote:
| This. It's not like amazon can't afford to support financially
| the open source projects they coopt
| EpicEng wrote:
| >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.
|
| 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.
| Ar-Curunir wrote:
| How would using GPL help here? Having the source code doesn't
| mean you have access to hardware like Amazon
| munk-a wrote:
| I think it should be possible to modify the GPL3 to disallow
| any usage in a for-profit setting - then you could
| individually re-license the code for different users to
| privately consume (and, optionally, free them from the
| burdens of the GPL3's copy-left infection). There'd be some
| issues, any commits you pulled in from the community wouldn't
| be eligible for re-licensing unless your PR acceptance flow
| included securing re-licencing rights from them - standard
| GPL3 copy-left code can't be converted to a private license
| without the agreement of the original authors.
| purpleidea wrote:
| > I think it should be possible to modify the GPL3 to
| disallow any usage in a for-profit setting
|
| That's not how GPLv3 works. Both in terms of selling [1]
| and in terms of additional permissions under section 7.
|
| GPLv3 without a CLA essentially requires you make the
| modified code available, but not when it's behind a
| cloud/webservice. For that you need AGPLv3.
|
| [1] https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/selling.en.html
| munk-a wrote:
| To clarify - that's why I specifically mentioned a
| modification, the CC-Attribution-Non-commerical license
| accomplished this in a non-software setting so I assume a
| sufficiently practiced lawyer could make the
| modifications to the GPL3 to specifically disallow usage
| in commercial settings - this would, after the
| modification, not be GPL3 anymore of course.
|
| This does go against some philosophical decisions
| underlying the GPL license but IMO GPL itself is less
| free than BSD/MIT licensing and to each their own.
| divbzero wrote:
| Which alternative license(s) would you recommend?
| cycloptic wrote:
| >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.
|
| 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.
| backtoyoujim wrote:
| This reads like big co marketspeak of "go suck eggs twice"
| EpicEng wrote:
| More along the lines of "I live in the real world". I can
| be empathetic to the situation and think the author
| essentially set themselves up for something like this all
| at the same time.
| [deleted]
| unethical_ban wrote:
| "Don't like how shitty people can be? I don't care" - that is
| how this kind of comment reads. But let's move on.
|
| 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.
| pbhjpbhj wrote:
| Like CC-BY-NC (Creative Combine, Attribution, Non-
| commercial). If you want to use the work commercially (ie
| for business purposes, commercial doesn't require selling)
| then you must negotiate licensing terms (or infringe
| copyright [Fair Use / Fair Dealing aside].
| greensoap wrote:
| Please don't encourage or suggest the use of CC anything
| for code. It just wasn't designed for code and creates
| huge ambiguities on the rights you intended.
|
| https://creativecommons.org/faq/#Can_I_use_a_Creative_Com
| mon...
|
| As stated on the Creative Commons website (licensed under
| CC-BY):
|
| Can I apply a Creative Commons license to software? We
| recommend against using Creative Commons licenses for
| software. Instead, we strongly encourage you to use one
| of the very good software licenses which are already
| available. We recommend considering licenses listed as
| free by the Free Software Foundation and listed as "open
| source" by the Open Source Initiative.
|
| Unlike software-specific licenses, CC licenses do not
| contain specific terms about the distribution of source
| code, which is often important to ensuring the free reuse
| and modifiability of software. Many software licenses
| also address patent rights, which are important to
| software but may not be applicable to other copyrightable
| works. Additionally, our licenses are currently not
| compatible with the major software licenses, so it would
| be difficult to integrate CC-licensed work with other
| free software. Existing software licenses were designed
| specifically for use with software and offer a similar
| set of rights to the Creative Commons licenses.
|
| Version 4.0 of CC's Attribution-ShareAlike (BY-SA)
| license is one-way compatible with the GNU General Public
| License version 3.0 (GPLv3). This compatibility mechanism
| is designed for situations in which content is integrated
| into software code in a way that makes it difficult or
| impossible to distinguish the two. There are special
| considerations required before using this compatibility
| mechanism. Read more about it here.
| dooglius wrote:
| It says
|
| >Instead, we strongly encourage you to use one of the
| very good software licenses which are already available
|
| But as far as I am aware, there are no comparable
| software licenses that prohibit commercial use. So, the
| CC NC licenses seem to be the only option here, even if
| supposedly imperfect.
|
| Do you have an example of an ambiguity with regard to
| non-commercial use?
| greensoap wrote:
| Heather Meeker, a great legal mind in the open source
| world, helped create this license:
| https://commonsclause.com/
|
| You might consider whether it serves your intended goals.
| [deleted]
| Navarr wrote:
| The "Fuck you, pay me" license.
|
| FYPML.
|
| Figuring out the right terms would be difficult, but not
| impossible.
| EpicEng wrote:
| >"Don't like how shitty people can be? I don't care" - that
| is how this kind of comment reads. But let's move on.
|
| No, I think I'll respond to that. It's not that I don't
| _care_, but it's naive at best to expect anything else.
| Besides, if your license allows it, they're not really
| taking advantage are they? Change your 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.
|
| Seems incredibly difficult to implement logistically, and
| most companies will probably just say "screw it" as they
| all hope to be valued at > 100M some day. Just enforce a
| per-basis license negotiation for commercial use or
| disallow it entirely. What happens if a company goes from a
| cap of 99M -> 101M -> 98M (etc etc). Just seems wrought
| with obvious problems.
| pydry wrote:
| I really wish a license like this existed, especially for
| libraries.
| no_wizard wrote:
| isn't this what redis did when they created their new
| license?
|
| In effect, if you sell redis as a service (which, and
| IANAL, as I understand doesn't mean you sell a service
| supported by using redis) you must pay them in some way.
| kortilla wrote:
| Why do you think it's shitty for Amazon to use an open
| source project this way? Do the licenses really mean
| nothing and the unwritten expectation is that the author of
| open source software should get rich if a someone else
| successfully productizes it?
| elwell wrote:
| > or a company wholly funded or owned by such company
|
| ^^ Written as if you've been burnt before...
| tick_tock_tick wrote:
| wholly funded nah we get $1 from Joe down the street he
| also owns it technically...
| garrettgrimsley wrote:
| It would include that so that the BigCo couldn't create a
| shell company or subsidiary to own the product and skirt
| the $100MM language
| funkaster wrote:
| This is what people don't get when arguing against GPL: "oh,
| it's such a restrictive license! so viral, blah blah blah".
| In this case, it would've probable not changed the outcome,
| but could give the author some leverage for either
| compensation or mention. IANAL, but my understanding is that
| GPL would require you to keep the same terms and mention
| explicitly the original source.
| suyash wrote:
| I would bet AWS wouldn't even touch it if it was under GPL,
| most companies have made it forbidden to use because of
| reasons you stated.
| toyg wrote:
| And would that be a bad thing? If the tool is good, FOSS
| users will get a competitive advantage over AWS.
| munk-a wrote:
| I had several discussions with fellow students in Uni
| about GPL vs. BSD licensing and BSD licensed code is,
| IMO, more free and more accessible - it really depends on
| what you want out of your code. Is your goal to provide a
| useful tool as a one-off that anyone can pick up and use?
| Then BSD is for you - otherwise, if you have expectations
| around self-maintenance of the code by consumers then you
| want to lean more toward GPL. The thing you get out of
| GPL that you lack with BSD is the ability to pull back
| changes and bug fixes from users - usually by explicitly
| excluding those parties which for legal/whatever reasons
| aren't comfortable re-sharing bug fixes.
| toyg wrote:
| Of course it's more free - corporations are free to take
| your code and do as they please, as we've just seen.
| arminiusreturns wrote:
| GPL is about freedom for the user, BSD/MIT is about
| freedom for the devs. Not all users are devs, but all
| devs are users. GPL is the better license for net
| freedom.
|
| It baffles me how many people fail to understand this.
| suyash wrote:
| "GPL is about freedom for the user" - define what do you
| mean by freedom, it's different for different people.
|
| GPL is the better license for net freedom. - it's not,
| because of it's virality, it pollutes other code and then
| demands everything fall into it's license, which is
| ethically wrong.
| heavyset_go wrote:
| > _GPL is the better license for net freedom. - it 's
| not, because of it's virality, it pollutes other code and
| then demands everything fall into it's license, which is
| ethically wrong._
|
| Nobody has a gun held to their head and are forced to use
| GPL code in their code.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > GPL is about freedom for the user, BSD/MIT is about
| freedom for the devs.
|
| Both are about freedom that is only directly meaningful
| for developers or people that can employ developers on
| their behalf; permissive license are about simply
| _providing_ that freedom rather directly, with
| limitations that tend to be focussed mainly on avoiding
| unexpected costs to the original provider of the software
| (liability, reputational, or otherwise). Copyleft
| licenses compromise direct provision of freedom to
| acheive broader but less direct social goals which relate
| to that freedom.
|
| If you both agree with the goal _and_ agree with the
| pragmatic judgement involved in the design of the
| detailed mechanics in a particular license about how to
| acheived that goal, its quite possible that a copyleft
| license is better for your interest.
|
| Personally, whether the goal is (and these are two very
| different goals I've seen cited by GPL proponents)
| _promoting_ development of free software or _inhibiting_
| development of nonfree software, I 'm not sure the GPL
| family (or any other copyleft license) does that better,
| in practice, than permissive licenses.
|
| The GPL is better at inhibiting nonfree direct
| descendants of a particular code base, but I don't
| generally see that as a valuable goal.
| graton wrote:
| FYI: Linux is licensed under GPL v2. AWS uses Linux
| extensively.
| archgoon wrote:
| suyash is basically correct; usage of GPL (any version)
| licensed software is very heavily scrutinized at Amazon.
| Explicit exceptions need to be filed for, and are rarely
| granted. Unless you can make a very strong business case
| for the software, you're not going to get it approved.
| munk-a wrote:
| Amazon has a legion of lawyers and probably quite a few
| technically apt ones that are actually comfortable diving
| into questions around whether a chef/ansible/whatever
| script to provision a linux box will go against GPL - and
| additionally whether pre-baked containers qualify or if a
| service to dynamically build pre-baked containers would
| qualify...
|
| These are, honestly, expensive questions to answer as the
| tech gets more complicated - at what point is linux part
| of the binary you're distributing vs. an external
| dependency and, if you get the answers wrong, you'll
| potentially create an outage that will wreck havoc on the
| economy by grinding the cloud to a halt and cost Amazon
| tens of billions in revenue.
|
| This is a very, very, complicated situation.
| timonovici wrote:
| Don't they already use MySQL for example? I don't think
| it would stop them in any way, unless some lawyers had
| some really antiquated views, coming straight from the
| 90's
| suyash wrote:
| MySQL has dual license and one of them if friendly to
| companies who can pay the fees.
| darkengine wrote:
| To my understanding, the GPL does not require acknowledging
| the original author's contributions any more publicly than
| the Apache license (used by the project). The Apache
| license already requires preserving the copyright notice,
| which AWS did. I think the issue is the author wanted a
| more public acknowledgement of his work, which is a very
| fair ask. As far as I know, no license requires this (and,
| I believe such a license would be GPL-incompatible).
|
| In my view, no license can enforce being a good citizen of
| the open source community. In the embedded space, I've seen
| vendors bound by the GPL follow it in letter but not in
| spirit (ie, delivering unusable code with a ridiculous
| toolchain), or just straight up ignore it (what are we
| going to do, sue?). On the flipside, good citizen vendors
| frequently contribute upstream even when they don't have
| to.
| toyg wrote:
| BSD and MIT licenses can be used with the advertising
| clause, and you can add anything you want. Similarly, you
| can add clauses to the GPL if you want.
|
| Licenses are contracts. You can add to the contract that
| people who fork must do star-jumps every morning, if you
| feel like; but you have to state it upfront.
| lutorm wrote:
| My understanding is that GPL doesn't force the user to do
| _anything_ except license any derived work under GPL. It
| specifically doesn't put _any_ limits on what someone can
| do with that code precisely because doing so would limit
| your freedom (with the exception of the licensing issue
| which is required so as to not deprive _other_ people of
| the freedom to do what they want with the code.)
|
| It specifically does not require you to pay homage to the
| original author. The point is to ensure that the code
| remains free, the original author has no say over what
| happens to it.
| foolmeonce wrote:
| That's true, but wanting acknowledgement in some specific
| way is pretty frivolous compared to wanting changes made
| to be available under the same license so the fork
| doesn't maintain an incompatibility/add-on advantage that
| can't be fixed.
|
| Whether the GPL is good enough for that depends on
| whether end users are recipients of binaries and
| therefore would be entitled to the source under GPL.
| semi-extrinsic wrote:
| AFAIK, the related question of whether an OSS license for
| a scientific software can _require_ that people using the
| software cite the paper(s) describing the software, has
| been answered in the negative. You can ask nicely, but
| you cannot demand it under any of the existing OSS
| licenses.
| pvorb wrote:
| > On the flipside, good citizen vendors frequently
| contribute upstream even when they don't have to.
|
| I once discussed that with my employer and they agreed:
| it's almost never a good idea to fork a product in order
| to fix bugs, since you will have to continouiusly
| maintain the fork. If you get the fix upstream, you'll
| get the maintenance for free. So this often is not out of
| generosity, but rather in their own interests.
| heavyset_go wrote:
| AGPL would also force Amazon to open-source their changes
| to services that they release that use AGPL code.
| cacois wrote:
| I think you have expressed my sentiments better than I did.
| wang_li wrote:
| It seems like you're arguing that people should get both the
| good will of having an open source license and the profits of a
| closed source license. Which comes across as disingenuous.
| oauea wrote:
| No, it's just good sense. If you're adopting an open source
| project then you clearly think the project has merit. So the
| people who created this project should be considered for
| maintaining the company fork, since they clearly know what
| they're doing.
| kortilla wrote:
| That doesn't follow. There have been many projects that
| I've seen forked internally because the original author
| didn't know how to write tests, maintain performance, etc.
|
| Open source projects are often very poorly maintained so
| being the steward of one that's interesting does not
| actually qualify you to productize it for a company.
| geodel wrote:
| But other companies, individuals may want to go in
| different direction taking current code as base. This is
| not a good reason to hire original author.
| ardy42 wrote:
| >> I really wish, that when COs like Amazon decided to
| productize a thing they either offered the core developer(s)
| enough $ to work on it full time (if they wanted) or a job to
| do that with a guarantee that as long as it was a product,
| and they wanted to work on it, they'd be allowed to continue.
|
| > It seems like you're arguing that people should get both
| the good will of having an open source license and the
| profits of a closed source license. Which comes across as
| disingenuous.
|
| It isn't. Linus Torvalds and all kinds of other people are
| paid to work on the Linux kernel, sort of like how the op
| suggests, and if that hadn't happened Linux would probably be
| a shadow of what it is now.
|
| The alternative is to have some guy slave away for another's
| profit, and eventually burn out (which happens to tons of
| open source developers).
| notatoad wrote:
| not just the profits of a closed-source licence, but _far
| beyond_ the profits of a closed-source licence. an amazon
| developer salary is well into the six figures annually, for
| presumably multiple years, which is easily more in one year
| than it would cost to outright acquire this product.
| ManBlanket wrote:
| Does it not muddy the waters when an open source project is
| outright appropriated as a paid service?
| bhhaskin wrote:
| Not really. There are a lot of open source licenses. If you
| care about that sort of thing then choose a license that
| doesn't allow it for commerical use.
| ghaff wrote:
| There is no open source license [1] that prohibits
| commercial use.
|
| [1] Specifically, no OSI-approved open source license but
| that's what most people equate with "open source
| license."
| pbhjpbhj wrote:
| Don't CC-NC licenses count?
| ghaff wrote:
| No. They're not OSI-approved licenses.
|
| It may also be worth noting that Creative Commons put a
| lot of effort into trying to define noncommercial over
| time and wasn't able to come up with a satisfactory
| answer. Obviously there are cases that are _clearly_
| commercial but many others are far less clear. This was
| being debated over a decade ago and nothing has really
| changed: https://www.cnet.com/news/does-the-
| noncommercial-creative-co...
|
| (A legit question. Have an upvote.)
| luhn wrote:
| I think OS creators _should_ reap some of the rewards of
| their software. Popular OS projects have provided incredible
| value to the industry. It 's only fair that some of that
| value trickles down. Sometimes it does (sponsorships, job
| offers, etc.), but oftentimes it doesn't. Obviously there's
| no rule enforcing that creators get their fair share, and
| nature of open source means there could never be such a rule.
| A blessing and a curse, I suppose.
| chemeng wrote:
| If core developers are bought up by a single company, I'd be
| wary of the future control, direction and progress of the
| project. The open source version would likely stagnate as the
| commercial version gains features. It'd be hard not to align
| with company goals and plans when your paycheck depends on it.
|
| 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.
| filoleg wrote:
| I agree, there is a certain potential danger associated with
| it, however, it seems like there are quite a few cases where
| it worked out great.
|
| 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.
| chemeng wrote:
| There are definitely cases where it seems to have worked
| out. My sense, like yours, is that it largely depends on
| how "community driven" the project is at that point. If it
| has many independent core developers/main contributors, or
| many diverse companies relying on it, it seems to work ok
| (for now).
|
| That said, it feels like there is a missed opportunity in
| the space. Most large companies already donate money toward
| interests in their local communities, etc. Why isn't there
| an easy mechanism for tech companies to donate to
| sustainable funding of open-source that they all depend on?
| My guess is that because open-source projects are rarely
| set up as organizations, they can't achieve 501(c)(3). It
| would not only be tax advantageous for companies, but would
| also support business continuity and recruiting pipelines.
| It would also be great for open-source developers and the
| community.
|
| Maybe there are efforts out there to create something like
| this?
| scarface74 wrote:
| An official response from someone at AWS.
|
| _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.
| [deleted]
| fractalb wrote:
| I heard people complaining about GPL that it is virus and is not
| business friendly. I'm just confused now. What's all these
| business friendly licenses about then?
| Animats wrote:
| That's what the GPL is intended to prevent.
| jgowdy wrote:
| I don't understand why people get upset about this. It's called
| open source for a reason. If you want recognition when someone
| uses your open source project, pick a license that has an
| advertising clause.
|
| 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.
| dsabanin wrote:
| Open source is getting perverse.
|
| 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?
| pornel wrote:
| That was always the plan. That's the essence of the difference
| between Open Source and Free Software.
|
| https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/open-source-misses-the-point....
| tonyedgecombe wrote:
| The irony is these corporations don't even value the software
| because they don't pay for it. Giving your software to them is
| like telling them your time is worth nothing.
|
| 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.
| ThrowawayR2 wrote:
| > " _The irony is these corporations don 't even value the
| software because they don't pay for it. Giving your software
| to them is like telling them your time is worth nothing._"
|
| 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.
| krapp wrote:
| What would you expect, that open source developers give their
| work away for free and corporations just pay them for it
| anyway?
|
| 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.
| beshrkayali wrote:
| I sympathize with the author of course, and tasteless tactic from
| AWS, but this is also why it's important to choose the
| appropriate license for what you want out of your project.
| pokemapper wrote:
| Here's another example of AWS interactions with OSS: instead of
| contributing a perfectly good and non-AWS dependant feature to an
| upstream project (PGBouncer, for a strictly PostgreSQL-level
| useful feature) they decided to rather stretch it and publish
| their changes as a _patch_ to the upstream project instead, with
| a different, restrictive license that only allows its usage on
| AWS services, together with examples on how to use it on
| RDS/Redshift:
|
| https://github.com/awslabs/pgbouncer-rr-patch/
|
| https://github.com/awslabs/pgbouncer-rr-patch/issues/3
| GordonS wrote:
| That's some really, really shitty behaviour - it _actively_
| seeks to screw over an OSS project they benefit financially
| from!
|
| Given how much AWS relies on developers, it boggles the mind
| how they get away with this kind of behaviour.
| MatthewMcDonald wrote:
| It's worth mentioning that this isn't just a case of people not
| being able to use the patch outside of AWS; the patch is
| actually impeding pgbouncer from implementing a similar
| feature:
|
| > 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.
| robocat wrote:
| Interesting:
|
| "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?
| znpy wrote:
| can't wait to see this story commented on n-gate.
| jeena wrote:
| What I don't quite understand is the logic of choosing a license
| which explicitly allows this and then getting mad that someone
| does what the license allows to do, why did you choose that
| license then?
| baybal2 wrote:
| That's how opensource works? I see no issue here whatsoever.
| dan1234 wrote:
| Looks like they did give some attribution in the NOTICES.txt
|
| https://twitter.com/maxibanki/status/1317071448322789376
| mxschmitt wrote:
| Yeah buts not visible to the enduser or be rewarded in any way.
| You have to download the CRX (Chrome extension) file yourself,
| extract it and then you could see the content of the
| NOTICES.txt...
| dragonwriter wrote:
| If you offer a license that doesn't require something, don't be
| surprised when people accept it and do only what is required by
| the license.
|
| That's literally the deal you offered.
| rickspencer3 wrote:
| Honestly, I agree with this. Your ethical standards should be
| encoded in the license.
|
| 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.
| throwawaysea wrote:
| Without knowing the details and veracity of the claims, I think
| there is a real danger with big companies like Amazon using their
| weight to take others' innovations and reap the rewards for
| themselves.
|
| 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.
| [deleted]
| auggierose wrote:
| I don't see why AWS shouldn't have to BUY a license from the
| developer. Why are developers giving away their work for free? If
| you require a thank you, you might just as well require them to
| pay you money. That's the only thank you from corporations that
| counts.
| peterwwillis wrote:
| Twitter _clap_ threads _clap_ make _clap_ bad _clap_ articles
|
| 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.
| dak1 wrote:
| I'm extremely disappointed to see how many comments on here focus
| on the very narrow legal questions and amount to: "Your license
| didn't say they couldn't."
|
| 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.
| whatsmyusername wrote:
| No it's not. It's just a license. I will never bet against the
| tragedy of the commons because it's easy money.
| pedro2 wrote:
| Open source software is more than a license and code.
|
| Nope. You are thinking "Free Software". "Open Source" is "just"
| that: a legal license which may or may not have ethical
| considerations and fuzzy feelings.
|
| You may wish to read https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/open-
| source-misses-the-point .
| CydeWeys wrote:
| This, incidentally, is why I tend to prefer the AGPL for stuff
| I write myself, as it aligns most closely with this "digital
| public square" idea. I'd simply rather not have an Amazon use
| my work in this sort of taking-without-giving way at all.
|
| 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.
| save_ferris wrote:
| > Open source software is more than a license and code. It is a
| community and the digital public square.
|
| 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.
| tannhaeuser wrote:
| > _OSS is a great thing that has tremendously benefited the
| industry_
|
| I'm beginning to question this. The proliferation and
| commoditization of F/OSS is what made SaaS business thrive,
| and made it so that integration and polish is the only avenue
| left to make a buck, leading to our paltry attention economy,
| oligopoly, and platform lock-in by network effects. This
| after decades of personal computing striving to liberate
| users from mainframes. F/OSS is also drying out - when was
| the last time you used a piece of software that truly
| achieved something useful on its own rather than solving a
| perceived problem that only exists because of the
| idiosyncratic nature of the web and cloud stacks? Meanwhile,
| maintainers of popular F/OSS get nothing in return.
| dboreham wrote:
| It benefitted the hardware industry in the same way free
| gasoline would benefit the auto industry.
| pas wrote:
| SaaS was a natural emergence from the Internet. Software is
| eating the world, and eventually it will eat itself too.
| Intermernet wrote:
| "when was the last time you used a piece of software that
| truly achieved something useful on its own rather than
| solving a perceived problem that only exists because of the
| idiosyncratic nature of the web and cloud stacks?"
|
| Go and Rust. Probably unpopular opinions, but I'm very glad
| those two languages are open source.
| pwdisswordfish0 wrote:
| I'd bet that this outlook is the sort of narrow-sighted,
| can't-even-understand-the-question sort of thinking that
| the person you're responding to had in mind when asking
| the question--as what _not_ to focus on when talking
| about the successes of FOSS. That even with the point
| made in a very straightforward way it gets responses like
| this is a huge signal of what sort of problem we 're
| dealing with.
|
| Go and Rust amount to infrastructure, not software that
| "truly achieve[s] something useful on its own".
| ryukafalz wrote:
| > when was the last time you used a piece of software that
| truly achieved something useful on its own rather than
| solving a perceived problem that only exists because of the
| idiosyncratic nature of the web and cloud stacks?
|
| All the time. One I use every day? Emacs. (Which long
| predates anything web or cloud related.) For a more
| recently developed example? Guix.
|
| Setting aside the fact that a very large portion of the
| software I use outside work is free software.
| pwdisswordfish0 wrote:
| > The proliferation and commoditization of F/OSS is what
| made SaaS business thrive[...] after decades of personal
| computing striving to liberate users from mainframes.
|
| That's because of developers' (read: devops folk) own
| narrow focus of open source. When someone talks about open
| source having won, they're referring to how their company
| has three dozen services published on GitHub that can
| somehow be strung together to approximate 60% of what their
| company is actually putting in people's hands at the end of
| the day. That's open source for you.
|
| Stallman and his acolytes had it right all along about
| focusing on free software as a philosophy meant to empower
| _users_ and not career programmers (who already generally
| make more than the average household...). It doesn 't
| matter if a smattering of SaaSsy services are open source
| if (a) it's mired in the sort of headaches that are par for
| the course in devops today with respect to actually being
| able to run the thing, and (b) the app that real, actually
| people are jabbing with their fingers and literally
| touching is still proprietary.
|
| So it's not a problem of too much open source; it's a
| problem of not enough, and a problem of eschewing with the
| user-focused underpinnings of free software along the way,
| to instead follow the career devopser's
| AWS/GitHub/whatever-powered path while advertising it as
| win. To borrow liberally from Alan Kay, the computing
| revolution hasn't been won--because it has not yet even
| happened.
| save_ferris wrote:
| > The proliferation and commoditization of F/OSS is what
| made SaaS business thrive, and made it so that integration
| and polish is the only avenue left to make a buck, leading
| to our paltry attention economy, oligopoly, and platform
| lock-in by network effects.
|
| Do I think F/OSS played a role in these issues? Absolutely.
| Do I think it's the primary role in causing these issues?
| Definitely not. I'd argue that weak antitrust law, ill-
| intentioned VC money, and lack of oversight of software
| titans play the biggest role in what you've described here.
| Yes, F/OSS gave the companies tools to iterate over app
| development quickly, but they were pushed for hockey stick
| growth and total market domination by the checkbooks, and
| the government has completely failed to police their
| behavior. F/OSS gave people with questionable incentives
| the ability to do questionable things, but it didn't create
| the motivation to do those questionable things.
|
| > when was the last time you used a piece of software that
| truly achieved something useful on its own rather than
| solving a perceived problem that only exists because of the
| idiosyncratic nature of the web and cloud stacks?
|
| I actually use a fair amount of F/OSS that is independently
| useful to me, projects like Hammerspoon, MIDIMonitor, VLC,
| MuseScore, and others. Yes, the majority of F/OSS that I
| use is for commercial purposes, but that's certainly not
| exclusive.
|
| > Meanwhile, maintainers of popular F/OSS get nothing in
| return.
|
| I completely agree with this, and I think it's one of the
| most critical problems to the F/OSS movement.
| dboreham wrote:
| > Open source software is more than a license and code. It is a
| community and the digital public square.
|
| I've never found this square.
| loriverkutya wrote:
| Corporations have nothing to do with community or people or
| ethical standards or environmental stuff or privacy. For a
| company an open source license is nothing else than the code
| and a license. For them, this is a very narrow legal question.
|
| 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.
| benjaminjosephw wrote:
| Capitalism doesn't _require_ the heartless pursuit of
| shareholder value. You're confusing the system with one
| particular ideology.
|
| Changing incentives, standards and cultural norms absolutely
| is possible within a capitalist system. In fact, it's
| required. Otherwise, capitalist economies quickly descend
| into oligarchies with skewed markets that favor those with
| all the capital.
|
| If profit were the _only_ motive without any other rules in
| play, that wouldn 't be capitalism at all. We need
| interventions in order to preserve a healthy system. To
| suggest otherwise is to defend an ideology that isn't
| capitalism itself.
| [deleted]
| quicklime wrote:
| I see what you mean, but in this particular case, there are
| licenses that explicitly require the sort of attribution that
| the tweeter was asking for - e.g. the BSD license with the
| "advertising clause", or maybe the AGPL. For some reason, open
| source developers are choosing not to use these licenses, and
| complaining about it later.
|
| 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.
| dak1 wrote:
| A lot of how people and even companies conduct themselves has
| as much to do with cultural norms as it does with strict
| legal requirements.
|
| It looks like Matt Asay, the lead for the open source and
| marketing team at AWS, has already reached out and said he's
| looking into it (and thanked Tim for the contribution).
|
| I think there's generally a cultural norm to recognize an
| individual's contributions in general, especially when freely
| given.
|
| If the comments on here largely echoed that sentiment and
| demonstrated that it was a cultural norm, expect AWS (and
| others) to be more likely to adhere to it in the future -- it
| costs almost nothing, but there's definitely a value in
| having a positive reputation.
|
| We do have the capacity as a community to define and uphold
| such cultural norms. Laws and licenses are not as binary as
| code.
| varispeed wrote:
| Big companies use OSS to avoid hiring employees and paying
| their wages plus taxes. It is a loophole that should be
| regulated.
| OmarShehata wrote:
| In what world does any company use open source software to
| save money??
|
| What is the alternative? Develop everything yourself in-
| house? That's not just expensive, it's dumb, because you'll
| get worse/less reliable software in general.
| frabert wrote:
| Honestly, this point is kind of nonsense to me. If people acted
| as if they were held to the higher standard, we would not need
| licenses. People (especially when they're not acting alone,
| e.g. corporations) act in their monetary interest, most of the
| time. Hence, stick to the license that's least restrictive that
| still ticks all the boxes you feel are important. If you feel
| attribution is important, choose a license that makes it
| legally binding.
| unethical_ban wrote:
| Essentially, you don't believe there is any gray area for
| something to be legal and yet a dick move.
| wpietri wrote:
| There's plenty of sense to it.
|
| Every contract, every law states what we see as the bare
| minimum required not to be actively harmful. They're
| society's skeleton. But bodies are more than bone, and
| societies are more than people doing the bare legal minimum.
|
| Look at what the law requires of parents, for example. Food,
| shelter, clothing, school attendance, a lack of physical
| abuse. But parents who do the legal minimum and no more are
| awful parents, and awful people. But more laws wouldn't help.
| What kind of law could guarantee love? What kind of police
| could enforce it?
|
| Community spirit is not something that can be expressed in a
| contract. Acting like people should have foreseen a
| particular asshole and tried to defend against them
| contractually is victim-blaming. The actual solution is for
| assholes to hear from the community that the behavior isn't
| welcome.
| [deleted]
| frabert wrote:
| I'd call this wishful thinking and something that's been
| proven time and time again to be not working as well as it
| should, in practice.
| Gehinnn wrote:
| I think it worked with Microsoft. They have a much better
| image now with regards to open source.
| tengbretson wrote:
| > If people acted as if they were held to the higher
| standard, we would not need licenses.
|
| In the same way that we must continue to steer our car even
| in the presence of guard rails, we must continue to act
| morally in the presence of rules.
| josalhor wrote:
| If I suggest an idea from a coworker in a meeting as if it
| was mine, that move would be seen, at the very least, as
| somewhat rude. If I got that idea from examining the
| competition, that would be seen as a smart move.
|
| Sure, if attribution is a _requirement_ then the natural
| thing to do is to turn it into a _legal requirement_. But I
| don 't think that is the discussion here.
|
| It comes down to how we want to treat open source. In order
| to encourage open source, I believe giving credit, even if
| not required, is courteous. Corporations are not monolithic
| entities that are perfectly defined. People work on these
| corporations.
| rbanffy wrote:
| Corporations the size of Amazon are imune to shame. If it's
| not a hard requirement, they'll only comply if it's not
| against their self interest to do so.
| geodel wrote:
| > If I suggest an idea from a coworker in a meeting as if
| it was mine, that move would be seen, at the very least, as
| somewhat rude.
|
| It will be lot more rude if your coworker now hit social
| media berating you for stealing other people's ideas. If
| just office ideas were this important may be they need to
| be submitted with process of academic journals with proper
| attribution.
|
| It can't be both ways: "Announcing that take my idea /
| software and run with it" And if someone does, telling them
| "you are first rate moocher, aren't ya?"
| Aeolun wrote:
| > It will be lot more rude if your coworker now hit
| social media berating you for stealing other people's
| ideas
|
| Would it? I'd be inclined to agree with the coworker.
|
| The message is not 'stealing other people's ideas', it's
| 'stealing other people's ideas without acknowledgement'.
| geodel wrote:
| > stealing other people's ideas without acknowledgement'
|
| Huh, I never heard of 'stealing with acknowledgement'.
| That'd be plain usage.
|
| > I'd be inclined to agree with the coworker.
|
| I'd think that co-worker would be subject of constant
| derision where people would run every trivial thing by
| them asking if they had thought it originally.
|
| Edit: To be clear I support directly confronting folks
| taking ideas often without attribution or taking to
| higher ups if that is so important. But social shaming
| means the person better be prepared to live up to much
| higher public standards than it would be for some
| interpersonal issue.
| lioeters wrote:
| I agree this is about the culture of software and open
| source in particular.
|
| Reducing the issue to the bare minimal legal requirement is
| stooping low, that we cannot expect corporations to behave
| ethically, with common decency and respect, unless forced
| to do so by law. Sure, that's the real world, but we should
| demand better of the people who run and work in these
| corporations.
| toyg wrote:
| _> that move would be seen, at the very least, as somewhat
| rude._
|
| In a few places I worked at, this was just par for the
| course. It's all in the (corporate) game.
|
| As much as decent, polite, and courteous people do exist
| (and I try to be one of them), it's a fact of life that
| assholes exist, and they often prosper on the back of such
| decent people.
| young_unixer wrote:
| > If you feel attribution is important, choose a license that
| makes it legally binding.
|
| Some of us think copyright is unfair and we want to use it as
| little as possible. That means using MIT or BSD licenses.
|
| That doesn't mean we are against attribution. We are only
| against the use of coercion to get attribution.
|
| We can say "It would be nice if you give attribution" without
| saying "I'm going to use my legal rights to coerce you into
| giving me attribution"
| kevincox wrote:
| That seems like a very hard line to me. Copyright gives
| fairly comprehensive control over use, however trying to
| draw a line somewhere down full-control, attribution or no
| control seems very hard.
|
| As it is today you can use your full control to allow full
| use with attribution. Of course the "unfairness" probably
| comes from the fact that you can't force others to do the
| same.
|
| In my opinion the best option is to keep copyright at "full
| control" with a time limit. Probably 10-20 years. However
| that doesn't solve your desire for only attribution.
| joseluisq wrote:
| It's very disappointing, not the laws called "facts" but this
| disjunction of the community arguing or even joking around
| simple people stuff credits. Which costs nothing to do it.
|
| 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.
| eplanit wrote:
| You'd have to get the warm and fuzzy emotional parts
| (community, public square, commons) codified into the license
| in order to enforce that "higher standard".
| mekal wrote:
| I think recognition by AWS would have been nice (win-win for
| both parties) but lack of it does not warrant public shaming.
|
| 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!
| serguzest wrote:
| You are talking about a trillion dollar company. I am sure
| their feeling wasn't hurt from "public shaming" Please save
| your empathy for the independent open source developer who
| spent his valuable hours on the project.
| appleflaxen wrote:
| If you _choose_ a license which explicitly lets them, and they
| do, then appealing to community is simply silly. If community
| and reciprocity is important to you, you simply must choose a
| GPL-like license that requires it.
|
| If you don't want it, simply say so! But if you say you don't
| care... don't complain when people do.
| devthrowawy wrote:
| This is incredibly naive. FOSS ultimately is business (if the
| code has any real value) and that's why there are licenses, to
| keep industry in 'check'. If RMS shared your optimism there
| would be no FOSS. Business are not people, they are entities
| driven by profit and the limits of law. Call it greed if you
| want but that's how you get endless $1 loafs of bread and the
| ability to fly anywhere in the US for a couple hundred bucks or
| less. If you really want something to be so, get it in writing.
| There is no 'community' like you illude to. Maybe in certain
| corners of the web or for some more notable projects, but there
| is plenty of FOSS that is really the backbone of a lot of sw
| and non sw infrastructure that is contributed to almost
| exclusively by corporations that are in competition with each
| other. FOSS is not just web devs hanging out on twitter making
| some app with a cute logo that will be forgotten in 3 years.
| There is big business going on and without a good license you
| have nothing.
| jitendrac wrote:
| That is totally fair according to the license used, even I don't
| find anything bad with it. Rather its a good portfolio item for
| oss developer.
|
| 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.
| [deleted]
| pacamara619 wrote:
| What licence did you use?
| ericls wrote:
| Is it possible to have a license that have different requirements
| for human beings and non-human beings(organizations,
| corporations, bots, etc). It feel like the author is upset
| because AWS is not a human being.
| snambi wrote:
| The best part is most open source developers were convinced that
| "APL" or "MIT" is the best license for their software.
|
| Why?
|
| APL, MIT , BSD allows companies fork a project without
| acknowledgement or contributing back.
| sabujp wrote:
| this is what you get for licensing under APL
| 0xmohit wrote:
| The OP posted "Show HN: Headless Recorder"
| <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24577642> 22 days ago.
| Amazon forked and released it as a service. They are efficient.
| RKearney wrote:
| Wrong post. It was over 2 years ago.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17760536
| tnolet wrote:
| Yeah, we renamed and relaunched it after adding Playwright
| support. Same project, code base etc. though
| Rapzid wrote:
| I'll comment in a different direction. I'm personally not a huge
| fan of these #SeleniumNotSelenium projects. A few only support a
| single browser, like Chrome, while utilizing selenium webdriver
| directly gives you access to all browsers with relative ease.
|
| 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.
| rfrey wrote:
| Much of the discussion in this thread has highlighted the
| difference between those who regard open source as a community
| and public good, and those who regard it as a resource to be
| exploited. The latter sees anything beyond legalistic compliance
| as an unreasonable expectation.
|
| 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.
| yourapostasy wrote:
| The exploitation view is mostly due to the anonymous nature of
| those personal, natural person individuals performing the
| decision to exploit. The personal cost to them of the decision
| is muted if it is felt at all: the endless layers of the
| corporate body shields them.
|
| 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.
| Chris2048 wrote:
| Describing the latter as "exploitation view" is the kind of
| bad-faith label ala pro-life vs anti-abortion.
|
| 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?
| rfrey wrote:
| I accept that criticism, I'll be more careful with labels.
| I've been using "exploitation" for so long in the ML sense of
| "exploitation vs exploration" that I forgot it can have
| negative overtones. Or maybe I ignored those overtones
| because of personal bias.
|
| 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.
| bloodorange wrote:
| What you call "exploitation view" is at the very core of a
| capitalistic mindset.
| sequoia wrote:
| A note to the "I'm seeing a lot of comments here" crowd, i.e.
| people saying "shame on you!" to commenters who point out that
| the author's expectations of how consumers should use his code
| are at variance with the license terms he released the code
| under:
|
| _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.
| senko wrote:
| Open Source authors need to be educated about the rights they
| give up with various licences, so they aren't "educated" in this
| way.
|
| 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.
| cdnsteve wrote:
| Congrats, your work was good enough to turn into a commercial
| project by a major top 3 cloud provider. That would make me feel
| like I would stand a little taller! You basically created a new
| AWS service, as v1, that's pretty cool to add to a CV ;) Just be
| patient, and make sure you figure out the colour of your Lambo
| now.
| CydeWeys wrote:
| The Lambo bit is rubbing salt in the wound, because the author
| isn't actually benefiting financially from this at all. Amazon
| is taking all of the profits. How's he supposed to compete
| against them?
| thrav wrote:
| I think the idea was that if they properly marketed their
| achievement, they could get Lambo level compensation at a big
| 3 cloud provider.
| toyg wrote:
| _> Just be patient, and make sure you figure out the colour of
| your Lambo now._
|
| 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.
| cdnsteve wrote:
| Yes, I thought that was fairly obvious.
| bawolff wrote:
| Meh, if you're not ok with someone forking your project, don't
| release it under a license that allows forking.
|
| 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.
| mjasay wrote:
| I run the open source strategy and marketing team at AWS. As I
| told Tim privately and publicly
| (https://twitter.com/mjasay/status/1317084448119169024), I hadn't
| been aware of this but am talking with the relevant product team
| to see how we can improve in his regard.
|
| 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.)
| [deleted]
| anigbrowl wrote:
| _We 're talking with Tim now about this._
|
| Offer him money and do it in public.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| sm84258 wrote:
| OK but also do not stop this development is all..
| yummybear wrote:
| Imo there needs to be an official policy from aws on thes kinds
| of issues. Taking a free product and monetizing it on this
| scale morally requires some compensation for the original
| creator(s).
| rickspencer3 wrote:
| I know Matt. I'm impressed that AWS hired him for this. That's
| a promising sign.
| unreal37 wrote:
| Good job taking responsibility, Matt. Handling this the right
| way.
|
| 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.
| cacois wrote:
| I honestly think there's room for more than gratitude with,
| as you said, a trillion dollar company. I know its hard to
| find a balance when we want free and open tools, developed in
| a spirit of sharing and enabling innovation. But something
| feels slimy about an enormous company deriving a huge amount
| of revenue from a FOSS project, when they could easily
| compensate developer(s) with barely an impact to their bottom
| line.
|
| I know its not required by licensing - but "legal" doesn't
| always mean "right".
| orangechairs wrote:
| Amazon stealing OSS products and repackaging them for
| profit is a behavior they are replicating over and over.
| Big and small projects alike are neither protected nor
| immune (see Mongo, Elastic, Redis,...)
|
| To see so much of the developer community respond by
| placing blame on the developers is heartbreaking and at the
| root of the tragedy of open source. It's either: your fault
| for using a permissive license OR shame on you for not
| using a permissive license. Where is the outrage at the
| predatory companies cannibalizing open source?
|
| We need to remember who the real enemy of open source is.
| The only company that benefits from open source shaming is
| Amazon.
|
| [1] https://techcrunch.com/2019/01/09/aws-gives-open-
| source-the-... [2]
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19364534 [3]
| https://thenewstack.io/redis-pulls-back-on-open-source-
| licen...
| barumi wrote:
| > Amazon stealing OSS products and repackaging them (...)
|
| Since when does providing managed services started to
| pass off as "stealing"?
|
| Am I stealing FLOSS projects as well if I install them on
| a production environment?
|
| It makes zero sense to try to pull this sort of bait-and-
| switch scam with FLOSS. If you release a project into the
| world while explicitly stating that everyone in the whole
| world is free to use it as they see fit then don't
| complain that someone was free to use it as they saw fit.
| calcifer wrote:
| Of course the blame is on the developers. If you don't
| want commercial enterprises to repackage your project and
| exclude you, choose a license that says that! How is this
| even controversial?
| sslayer wrote:
| I think the legal aspect of the licensing determines what
| is "right", otherwise the definition of "right" can be
| interpreted different ways. Don't be fooled, both parties
| entered into a contract. One when they published the
| software, and one when they used the software. Any
| expectations outside of that are left undocumented.
| mosselman wrote:
| "Right" can always be interpreted in many ways. There is
| nothing wrong with that. In fact, it is when "right" is
| just one thing when we need to worry.
| cacois wrote:
| Even agreed-upon contracts can be predatory. Maybe there
| should be a license that says "free and clear for
| everyone but trillion-dollar companies, because they
| should really compensate developers for value".
|
| I personally think it would be a great look for Amazon if
| they made it a policy to compensate developers from whom
| they derive significant economic value. Because they can,
| and because the developers deserve it.
| barumi wrote:
| If developers expected to get compensated for the work
| they explicitly and voluntarily released for anyone and
| everyone in the world for absolutely free, wouldn't they
| have released it under different terms? I mean, it sounds
| awfully dishonest to do a 180 on the expectations once a
| user with a deep enough wallet happens to be singled out.
| ncmncm wrote:
| A license is not a contract. Using and distributing Free
| Software is not entering into a contract.
|
| You certainly can have a contract around a license, but
| that is a whole other topic.
| throwawgler87 wrote:
| Legally no, morally yes
| branon wrote:
| Legally no, morally no, ethically yes?
| LukeBMM wrote:
| I feel like this is an underrated distinction. While
| definitions vary, this way of looking at it resonates
| pretty strongly with me, personally.
| tunesmith wrote:
| Interesting, how would you define ethically different
| than morally?
| jeromenerf wrote:
| In a nutshell, ethics is a bit more pragmatic than
| morals. Ethos and moralis, the customs and "of the
| customs".
| branon wrote:
| It was my impression that morality regards the beliefs of
| one person/entity (here, Amazon) while ethics refers to a
| different/opposing group.
|
| So clearly Amazon has no moral scruples about doing what
| they did, but to us (or others) it's ethically ambiguous.
| barumi wrote:
| > So clearly Amazon has no moral scruples about doing
| what they did
|
| Dude, they picked a software project that was released to
| the world under a license that explicitly allows anyone
| and everyone to use it as they see fit, and they
| proceeded to use the software.
|
| Please do explain exactly wheredo you see any breech in
| morality.
| a1369209993 wrote:
| Well, disagreeing about which words to use doesn't
| necessarily mean there's any disagreement about the
| object-level situation, but FWIW, the definition I've
| generally heard is that "ethics" refers to the whole
| general "ought" side of the is-ought distinction, which
| is further divided into: axiology, which outcomes are
| actually desireable in the first place; morality, what
| actions and strategies people ought to follow to achieve
| those outcomes; and law (not, unfortunately, to be
| confused with actual law), how groups of people ought to
| act in order to deal with coordination problems and evil
| people.
| ghostwriter wrote:
| Morality is a code of values a person may hold, whereas
| ethics is a philosophic (scientific) approach to
| discovering and defining such codes, and an attempt to
| answer two specific questions - whether a human being
| needs a code of values, and if so, what code of values
| they should choose to flourish as a human being (and not
| as any other "being").
|
| So, a person may be clear morally, based on a code of
| values that puts an emphasis on a legal aspect of
| interactions between people, but from the perspective of
| ethics we can observe that such a code may not be
| sufficient to fully realise their potential of
| flourishing as a human being.
| dr_dshiv wrote:
| Ethically yes -- simply because it will be in their best
| interest to do so over time.
|
| That's why "Amazon can do better." Not to act more
| altruistically, but to do better. If they keep doing
| things like this, it won't be good for them.
| Reimersholme wrote:
| "It's always day one at Amazon" is their motto meaning
| they'll hustle and squeeze out as much profit as possible
| without a thought of contributing back if it doesn't increase
| their bottom line.
| gozzoo wrote:
| It doesn't sound exactly like taking responsibility to me.
| It's more an acknowledgment of the fact and damage control.
| Taking responsibility would suggest admitting fault and
| taking action to make things right. His statement doesn't
| have any of these. 'I am looking into it' is too vague and
| doesn't mean much.
|
| 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.
| eitland wrote:
| > If there's anything to improve, "reach out first" will be a
| start.
|
| Just don't repeat Microsofts smooth talk, make-your-own and
| ghost strategy ;-)
|
| It is possibly even worse than just forking.
| rorykoehler wrote:
| Surely you should be sending him a significant pay check.
| You're worth billions and just ripping off other peoples
| projects?
| strangemonad wrote:
| Honestly, even putting aside the social and community aspects.
| When I'm evaluating a technical offering I'm often very willing
| to pay for "hosted xyz". I feel like I'm reading through the
| tea leaves to understand which AWS product offering is more or
| less a hosted offering of an open source product and what
| additions AWS has made that might change performance
| characteristics. Even without upstreaming changes, if the
| offering were pitched as "hosted X with these additions unique
| to aws" I would likely choose the hosted option over operating
| it myself.
|
| It goes without saying though that supporting the open source
| core (and the core developers) would also go a long way.
| tnolet wrote:
| OP here. Matt and I are chatting about this. We will work it
| out. As per my tweet, it's not about the letter of the
| licensing, it's about the spirit.
| dingaling wrote:
| > it's not about the letter of the licensing, it's about the
| spirit
|
| 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.
| nickff wrote:
| Other people are saying this, but AWS is taking a
| reputational risk here. If things get bad enough, we could
| end up with no-Amazon clauses in OSS.
| benjaminjosephw wrote:
| Open source culture is so much more than the licenses. A
| license dictates what is legally permissible but it doesn't
| mean that there aren't other cultural expectations that go
| with that.
|
| Eric Raymond famously wrote about the customs of open
| source in Homesteading the Noosphere: "I have observed
| these customs in action for 20 years, going back to the
| pre-FSF ancient history of open-source software. They have
| several very interesting features. One of the most
| interesting is that most hackers have followed them without
| being fully aware of doing so."[0]
|
| It is possible for us to have norms of mutual respect
| beyond what is legally required. I think those norms are
| actually at the heart of open source and have been since
| the beginning. I hope we never abandon them just because
| they are "not in black and white".
|
| [0] - http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/cathedral-
| bazaar/homestead...
| ncmncm wrote:
| Eric Raymond is probably the least reliable narrator of a
| Free Software ethos that one could pick.
| pwdisswordfish4 wrote:
| It's off-the-charts irony to point ESR's observations to
| try to validate the author's response here, and to frame
| it in the terms of some monolithic "open source culture".
| The brogrammer devops culture in 2020 is starkly
| different from its forebears--the two hacker cultures in
| focus in CatB. In fact, the entire premise of the book
| (it's in the name!) is a commentary on the distinction of
| cultures and the risk of misleading yourself if you're
| not thinking clearly and make the mistake of conflating
| them.
| [deleted]
| melenaboija wrote:
| When someone publishes code with permissive licenses has to
| expect that all kind of users will take advantage of it in
| different ways.
|
| That does not mean that is probably doing it for the ones
| that will be graceful of it. Opensource is not just about
| licenses but a way of creating.
| GordonS wrote:
| In theory, yes.
|
| But Amazon is a member of the OSS community, and AWS relies
| heavily on developers, many of whom care a great deal about
| the spirit of OSS and being a good and responsible member
| of the community.
| rmrfstar wrote:
| Not quite the same behavior, but BigCo's free-riding on FOSS
| is nothing new.
|
| "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...
| hanniabu wrote:
| Using open source software is different than selling it and
| profiting off of it without even contacting the project's
| maintainers.
| [deleted]
| barumi wrote:
| > As per my tweet, it's not about the letter of the
| licensing, it's about the spirit.
|
| 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?
| suyash wrote:
| Do let us know what comes out of it in a blog as there are
| many other people like you out there.
| bluetwo wrote:
| Honestly, AWS should have a policy they apply consistently.
| Maybe mention that in your conversations.
| gowld wrote:
| You mean it's not about the letter or the spirit of license
| at all; it's about the spirit of plagiarism, or sociability,
| or something.
| gigatexal wrote:
| Wow what a great take. Kudos for doing the right thing here.
| Very excited to see how this pans out.
| code4tee wrote:
| Guy writes some open source code and puts a license on it saying
| others can use it as they please. Someone else uses it. Guy goes
| on Twitter to complain someone used it without credit. In
| response to rant on Twitter someone points out that there
| actually is acknowledgement in the code. So in the end, they used
| it and gave him credit. Guy is like, oops, well that's cool.
|
| Sigh.
| [deleted]
| maurys wrote:
| Does anyone know the exact details of what Redis is using to
| prevent something like this?
|
| 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.
| natmaka wrote:
| Isn't the 'Attribution Assurance License' pertinent?
| https://opensource.org/licenses/AAL
| franklampard wrote:
| Great PR move from Tim.
|
| He seized the opportunity to advertise his product on the topic
| article on HN.
| frabert wrote:
| If you don't like the terms of the license for software you
| released maybe you should have chosen a different one.
| nicoburns wrote:
| There's surely a space between "perfectly acceptable" and
| "illegal"? I don't like this idea that you have no right to
| complain about something if you haven't specifically banned it
| in a legally enforceable license.
| frabert wrote:
| For big companies, there's no distinction between "morally
| acceptable" and "legal". Stick to a license where what's
| immoral to you is made illegal.
| lki876 wrote:
| For people there is and its always people who make
| decisions. Companies are just a legal entity.
| zelphirkalt wrote:
| But then it depends on what kind of people with what kind
| of mindset make such decisions, doesn't it? (Hint: It's
| not the altruistic "share with everyone" mindset they
| have.)
| nicoburns wrote:
| I don't think that's entirely true. Large companies respond
| to public pressure over things all the time. Some of the
| better run ones also take the initiative to do things
| ethically off the bat. If a large company is treating
| "legal" as "morally acceptable" then we should be calling
| them out on this, not accepting as part of being a large
| company.
|
| We should certainly _also_ update legislation to force them
| to do things ethically, but it 's not always possible to
| cover every possible case and thus our society depends on
| at least some level of corporate ethics.
| boomlinde wrote:
| _> I don 't think that's entirely true. Large companies
| respond to public pressure over things all the time._
|
| That type of response to pressure isn't necessarily of a
| moral nature. If your customers are boycotting you for
| not including skub in your product, your choice to
| include skub in the future could simply be an effort to
| maintain your customer base, regardless of what moral
| values skub (non-)inclusion represents.
| kllrnohj wrote:
| If that were true then big companies wouldn't have PR
| departments. But they do, because public image does
| actually matter to them. Brand recognition & emotional
| response to those brands is a _huge_ part of being a big
| company.
| ivanbakel wrote:
| In this case, the author can set out what they think is
| acceptable in their license terms. Attribution costs nothing
| to the user - so if you want it, stick it in your license.
|
| People should be able to comfortably use software within the
| bounds of the license without worrying about the author
| coming along and then shaming them for not complying with an
| _additional_ set of implicit constraints.
|
| Yes, it would have been nice for Amazon to acknowledge the
| original author. But given that they are not obligated to,
| it's unfair to act as if they are at fault for not doing so.
| threatofrain wrote:
| A credit-to-author clause has been tried before by the tech
| community, and IMO it's up to the community and not an
| individual author to develop a license which fits. The
| reason is because any modification to a well-known
| agreement makes your license very expensive to understand,
| even if it's a trivial modification.
|
| Open source licenses only work because the community adopts
| them as a standard.
| another-dave wrote:
| I'd agree with this -- with things like Creative Commons
| it's very clear if someone is asking for attribution or
| not, if it allows non commercial etc.
|
| In an enterprise company, it's _much_ easier to use
| something with an established licence. Having "MIT with
| attribution" might be waved through by a standing policy.
| Having "my custom MIT fork" needs Legal involved & may
| not be a hill to die on so just get ditched instead.
| mywacaday wrote:
| I think it comes back to politeness, somewhere in amazon
| there is product manager that saw or was shown Tim's repo
| and saw an opportunity(nothing wrong with that). It would
| have been a nice thing to do to give him a shoutout just
| like it was a nice thing to do of Tim's to release his code
| under a permissive license. There must be a mountain of
| code forked by large companies that if given some sort of
| recognition would be of benefit to the original author even
| if its only internet points.
| richardwhiuk wrote:
| lol. That's almost certainly not how this worked.
|
| This worked by:
|
| - The PM set some broad brush requirements.
|
| - An engineer saw there was some useful code.
|
| - They/their infrastructure checked that it was under a
| sensible license.
|
| - They added it
|
| - They released it
|
| - Someone noticed that their product was being used under
| the license that they had released it under.
|
| - ..
|
| - Big deal?
| nacs wrote:
| > An engineer saw there was some useful code.
|
| This is full clone of the original project, not "some
| code".
| dalbasal wrote:
| Look.. going back up the thread and the tweet.
|
| There has to be daylight between legal "fault" or
| obligation and courtesy. The author isn't going on a
| tirade, he made a quip.
|
| We have faculties, as humans, that aren't strictly legible
| in the way a license or legal code is. Laws are not a
| substitute for custom or courtesy. We do need both. No one
| said they stole. They said they were discourteous.
| ivanbakel wrote:
| But the author had the opportunity to specify the
| behaviour that he felt was courteous enough. Some people
| do not care about shout-outs, and those people do not
| include attribution clauses in their code licenses.
|
| I also did not mean "fault" in the legal sense, but
| rather in the sense of courtesy. It is not a faux pas to
| comply neatly with the terms of a public contract. What
| you're suggesting is that Amazon erred in not mentioning
| the author, but the fact that is visible to everyone in
| the license is that the author does not care about
| attribution.
|
| I don't like the insinuation that a license can be non-
| exhaustive in its conditions for the "correct" use of
| open-source software. You shouldn't run the risk of
| offending an author by violating some tacit,
| contradictory rule.
| kllrnohj wrote:
| > But the author had the opportunity to specify the
| behaviour that he felt was courteous enough.
|
| So I'm free to treat you like an absolutely piece of
| shit, be a raging asshole at you, and you're going to
| defend my horrendous treatment of you just because
| legally I'm allowed to and you failed to make a contract
| with me saying I have to be nice in excruciating detail
| that's legally enforceable?
| monsieurbanana wrote:
| Do you also dislike interacting with people, seeing how
| there's no such thing as an exhaustive list of things to
| do and not to do?
|
| This is not even an analogy, it's what is being
| discussed. AWS didn't do anything illegal with regards to
| their usage of open-source, but we live in a society, and
| we do have innumerable tacit rules. One of them is that
| you should give credit to where credit is due.
| ivanbakel wrote:
| Software licensing already breaks many tacit rules that
| people normally take for granted. It's rude to copy
| someone else's creation without asking first - but if
| they license their code in a way that allows for copies
| to be created, it is no longer rude to copy that code
| without permission.
|
| It is also rude to sell someone else's work without
| permission. But if they choose a software license
| _without_ a non-commercial clause, it is no longer rude:
| and this implies that the _absence_ of a feature in a
| license is a kind of approval of its opposite.
|
| If you choose a license without an attribution clause in
| it, you are admitting, publicly, that you _do not care_
| about attribution - not that you require, nor that you
| forbid it, just that you are ambivalent. If somebody goes
| on to use your code without attribution, you are wrong to
| then point out that they have been "rude" to you,
| because you have already declared your indifference.
|
| I'm not suggesting that unwritten rules are bad. I'm
| suggesting that trying to introduce unwritten rules to a
| system where written rules (i.e. licenses) already exist
| is a bad thing. Software licensing already sits at the
| intersection of legal and social obligations, because
| attribution is a feature with essentially no legal
| impact; treating a software license as a social contract
| is not a mistake.
| dalbasal wrote:
| IDK... lets remember that this is a low stakes game. At
| worst, someone is now cross with aws product people.
|
| Also, it's not like we're talking about arcane
| pleasantries that no one could have anticipated. Say JKRR
| opens Harry Potter, copyleft or something. You record an
| audio version and sell it with great success. Is it not
| obviously courteous to mention her in some way?
|
| It's even moreso, if you are aws, and JKR is just a
| regular author.
|
| It's not like anyone who uses a library is expected to
| perform a ritual dance. It's common sense basics and if
| you get it wrong nothing happens. Doesn't seem like a lot
| to ask.
| himinlomax wrote:
| > so if you want it, stick it in your license
|
| It's a rather pointless burden and not without cost, as it
| can make it incompatible with other licenses.
|
| It's reasonable to expect some credit to be acknowledged
| even when it's not mandated by law. Just common courtesy.
| barkingcat wrote:
| That's the way corporations have acted forever.
|
| If attribution is needed, put it in the license.
| acomjean wrote:
| They'll do it too.
|
| If I look through the menus of my oldish (not smart)
| Panasonic flatscreen tv, there is a menu option that
| displays all the licenses of the open source software used.
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| Oh you have the right to complain, just no legal recourse or
| entitlement to anything.
| clinta wrote:
| I would prefer to see these things enforced by culture and
| norms rather than laws and licenses. I don't want to have to
| parse legalese as part of my role as an engineer. I don't
| want companies to have to hire more lawyers to verify they
| can use software I wrote. I want them to be able to just use
| it, then contribute back after they've experienced using it.
| I don't want a restrictive license may prevent them from ever
| even trying my software in the first place. I want culture
| and norms that encourage the company to contribute to the
| project, not laws.
| boomlinde wrote:
| _> There 's surely a space between "perfectly acceptable" and
| "illegal"?_
|
| If there is, it's a space that you can minimize using
| licensing terms, and as a user I will assume that the
| licensing terms are chosen by the authors in a fashion that
| best represents their interests. Especially since so many
| template licenses exist that address this exact problem.
|
| _> I don 't like this idea that you have no right to
| complain about something if you haven't specifically banned
| it in a legally enforceable license._
|
| I think it's unfair to imply that the post you respond to
| represents that idea, if that's what you're doing. Although
| worded frankly, it's a constructive suggestion for what
| proprietors can do to prevent this. It's not a new problem.
| tnolet wrote:
| OP here. You are 100% right. But it's more about the spirit
| than the letter here.
|
| 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.
| senko wrote:
| I agree with you, but Amazon hasn't reached $1.6T market cap
| by being "nice".
|
| (edit: corrected amount, thx jimhi).
| warrenq wrote:
| You missed a T there.
| jimhi wrote:
| 1.6 TRILLION
| cute_boi wrote:
| in USD too.
| searchableguy wrote:
| Next time, slap AGPL. Maybe offer an alternative license to
| companies for GitHub sponsorship alongside.
|
| I really hate this happens to people. :(
| LockAndLol wrote:
| Would a restrictive open-source license even have stopped them?
| Would any American court fine an American mega-company over
| something like this?
|
| 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.
| tinus_hn wrote:
| Common courtesy is made of unwritten rules and it _does_ serve
| a purpose.
| pornel wrote:
| For person-to-person interactions or small communities.
| Unwritten rules don't work for corporations. They're driven
| by what's profitable and (not even always) what's legal.
| tuna-piano wrote:
| If Jeff Bezos has a $50 meal at a restaurant and tips $0, would
| you blame the restaurant for not having a mandatory tipping
| policy? Or would you blame Jeff Bezos for cheaping out and not
| following the community norm?
| curiousgal wrote:
| > _Not necessary as per the APLv2 license_
|
| The conversation ends there, doesn't it?
| andi999 wrote:
| Is this a typo and shd ve GPLv2?
| ratsimihah wrote:
| https://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0
| andi999 wrote:
| Thanks. But is this standard to abbreviate to APLv2? I only
| knew the language APL and the apache license is normally
| abbreviated apache-v2, or so, isnt it?
| Hamuko wrote:
| Well, the legal one at least. Morals are another thing, but
| maybe that's not really Amazon's concern.
| 3pt14159 wrote:
| Not really. The conversation goes on as long as we like. Part
| of OSS is about trust and reputation. AWS could have really
| helped the maintainer with a single sentence and they didn't.
|
| 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.
| romanovcode wrote:
| When you are a huge company you have to be careful about
| saying thanks to Barista.
|
| Maybe the developers would like to say thanks to barista but
| lawyers said to the developers to not talk to the barista no
| matter what since it's safer to say nothing than risk saying
| something wrong.
| tryptophan wrote:
| >Part of OSS is about trust and reputation.
|
| If trust and reputation were enough, we would not need
| licenses. The GPL is great and had the impact it did exactly
| because it _forced_ people to do things.
| h0l0cube wrote:
| > AWS could have really helped the maintainer with a single
| sentence and they didn't.
|
| It's not befitting a large enterprise like AWS to tell their
| prospective customers that they are just wrapping their infra
| around free software in their marketing copy. If that single
| sentence even slightly impresses upon .1% of their potential
| customers that they ought to spin it up on their own
| infrastructure, obviating their need to pay for the service,
| that's plenty of disincentive to add the message.
| shawnz wrote:
| Amazon's entire cloud business revolves around providing
| managed infrastructure as an alternative to self hosted
| solutions, so I don't think that is really a secret
| regardless.
|
| Also, consider that they rely on having a positive
| reputation to attract engineering talent and also to
| continue to get third party developers to release their
| infrastructural code under permissive licenses.
| Xylakant wrote:
| That's not as clear cut as your post may make it seem. Some
| users (me, for example) are more inclined to use a hosted
| service of some open source software than of some
| proprietary piece. Because that gives me a migration option
| if the providers service no longer fits my needs. For
| example, I'm paying four digits a month for some hosted
| Postgres database.
| varispeed wrote:
| The model where company makes money off of someone else's
| work without paying them should be illegal. Currently you
| cannot hire someone as an apprentice and don't pay them - you
| need to give at least the minimum wage. OSS is sort of a
| loophole where companies can obtain work without payment. I
| think this practice should be illegal and regardless of the
| license company adopting OSS solution should pay its
| contributors market rates - that is the amount of money it
| would take AWS to pay to create such product.
| pfdietz wrote:
| > The model where company makes money off of someone else's
| work without paying them should be illegal.
|
| So, once an author is dead, it should be illegal to sell
| anything they created? Or should ownership rights in
| content for the estate last forever?
|
| Your idea is terrible when examined in detail.
| varispeed wrote:
| This is an edge case, but for sure they would have family
| members who would inherit the titles and in an event of
| absence of such people then the state should take
| ownership.
| pfdietz wrote:
| Wait, I should be forced to give the state control over
| my creation, instead of being able to make it free to
| everyone, forever? Monstrous.
| 3131s wrote:
| You want to make permissive licenses illegal or what?
| That's ridiculous.
|
| Pick something like the MariaDB or CockroachDB license if
| you don't want Amazon to provide a hosted version of your
| software.
| varispeed wrote:
| Yes it should be illegal to use OSS in SaaS platforms
| without paying the OSS contributors.
| 3pt14159 wrote:
| I appreciate the underlying sentiment, but I disagree. When
| I contribute to OSS it's my choice to and I want the right
| to let anyone do whatever they want with code _even if_ I
| never exercise that right.
|
| Personally, I think OSS licences should be changed to
| prohibit unpaid use by any entity that has a single
| stakeholder worth more than a billion dollars. That way the
| startups and medium sized businesses around the world can
| benefit and the tech lottery winners pay something
| reasonable ($1m a year, say) to support OSS.
| varispeed wrote:
| There is the same argument that people who want
| apprenticeship use. They want to work for a company and
| learn, but company won't hire them because they don't
| have money to pay for "idle" worker and the overhead to
| teach them. But this is for the greater good. In the past
| you had companies who used their market share in
| particular city to drive wages down and people had a
| choice either work for them and starve or move to
| different city. Minimum wage stops this, at a cost of
| some people being unable to work for free. I can accept
| that.
|
| There will be projects for sure that would love their
| software were used by AWS and other companies without
| paying them, but that will only create a race to the
| bottom. We should stop exploitation of engineers by these
| giant companies.
| lki876 wrote:
| Not legally required != shouldn't do it.
|
| 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.
| joseluisq wrote:
| However, if a company that uses some OSS stuff is not under a
| moral obligation to do so? If not so, then why do we do OSS
| with licenses? Why not just Copyright everything?
| ojnabieoot wrote:
| This is analogous to "hey, fella, I have a First Amendment
| protects right to be a manipulative, sociopathic liar" - it's
| true, and it doesn't invalidate people complaining about your
| behavior.
|
| AWS did something rude, unprofessional, and indicative of bad
| OSS citizenship. The fact that the lawyers can sign off on it
| is irrelevant.
| jillesvangurp wrote:
| Not really, it's about Amazon not being a great OSS citizen.
| They don't have to be but it's a combination of immature, rude,
| and unprofessional to not be like that if your core business is
| packaging up and integrating other people's OSS software.
|
| 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.
| kevmo wrote:
| Jeff Bezos is the richest man in the world because he underpays
| labor. Taking open source code without even a cursory attribution
| is completely within the ethos of Amazon.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2020-10-16 23:01 UTC)