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".
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.
>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.
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
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/Default/Extensions/bhdnlmmgiplmbcdmkkdfplenecpegfno/0.0.1_0/NOTICE.txt (though perhaps I should).
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.
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.
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.
> 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".
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.
> 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.
> 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.
Well, there are rules around defamation, libel and slander. But you're right, there's no laws saying one cannot guilt trip someone else or shame them for their behavior even if they are acting legally.
I think this is me criticizing those same "social norms". In my opinion, it is unfair to guilt trip someone or have hidden expectations when someone does a good deed for you. Especially when you decided to do the deed on your own and you went and promoted it for others to benefit and use.
Obviously it's nice when you do something and others thank you and acknowledge you for it. But it isn't nice when someone complains they're not getting a thank you for something they choose to do willingly and weren't asked to do.
Now I reckon here it's a bit different, because we're talking about two actors of very uneven footing, and I would like to see Amazon being more thankful and recognising the hard work of open source contributors. I agree with that sentiment. I just wanted to say that in general, yes those social norms are often against what I'd consider a free society, since they are just another axis of power to force you into behaviors you might not have agreed to participate in.
> But it isn't nice when someone complains they're not getting a thank you for something they choose to do willingly and weren't asked to do.
If you benefit from something someone else does, you owe them a debt of gratitude. It's not a legal debt, and it's not denominated in dollars and cents... but you shouldn't be surprised that there are norms of repaying this debt in various ways and that people/entities that excessively "take" from the commons incur reputational damage.
> I just wanted to say that in general, yes those social norms are often against what I'd consider a free society, since they are just another axis of power to force you into behaviors you might not have agreed to participate in.
This just feels like hyperbole to me. Expecting acknowledgment from someone when they've benefitted from something you've done is not an unreasonable ask. Getting shamed when you don't do this isn't a significant curtailment of liberty.
> If you benefit from something someone else does, you owe them a debt of gratitude. It's not a legal debt, and it's not denominated in dollars and cents... but you shouldn't be surprised that there are norms of repaying this debt in various ways
Yes and this is what I'm criticizing. If I am in dept, then say so and make it explicit to me before I take the dept unknowingly, otherwise I'm sorry, but I will in turn shame you for being a cry baby and I won't abide by these norms, because I disagree with them.
To me, social norm is just another form of force to impose ones will on others. And thus an attack on liberty. And the idea of a social contract is that I consent to give away some liberties for being able to participate in a functioning society. But when the social contract isn't explicit, and expectations arn't stated, I find that unfair, no matter if the force is physical or psychological. The act of coming back after the deed, and saying that accepting the deed bound me to X,Y,Z where none of those was stipulated, ya I find that crooked. At this point anything can be stipulated. For example, what is Amazon supposed to do here? Should they offer a job? Pay up some amount of money? Cancel their project? Put a banner on amazon.com thanking the contributor? How long should the banner stay up? Etc. They're just at the mercy of the wims of others, and they might start to regret having taken this "dept" which they didn't know came with all these strings attached. And by the way, it's not just that they didn't know, on fact, the author had written down in details as part of the attached license what all the expectations were, but now claims that more was implicitly expected based on some loosely defined social norms. Had the work been unlicensed, Amazon would not have used it.
P.S.: But again, just to be clear, I'm talking about the principles at play here, in this particular scenario, I acknowledge this isn't like a massive issue and a crazy demand or attack on Amazon's liberty. And I'd be really amazed and impressed and would think highly of Amazon if they went above and beyond the license here.
> To me, social norm is just another form of force to impose ones will on others. And thus an attack on liberty. And the idea of a social contract is that I consent to give away some liberties for being able to participate in a functioning society. But when the social contract isn't explicit, and expectations arn't stated, I find that unfair, no matter if the force is physical or psychological.
Welp, good luck with that. There's tens of thousands of social rules that are understood by 99% of people, and you're not going to find an explicit list somewhere of how far to stand away from someone when talking to them, to what kinds of initial conversations are appropriate, to saying "thank you" after someone gives you something, to attributing an idea to someone else, etc. And failing to follow them will rapidly earn you scorn.
> For example, what is Amazon supposed to do here? Should they offer a job? Pay up some amount of money? Cancel their project? Put a banner on amazon.com thanking the contributor?
If the product is 98% built upon some open source stuff, you put in the 2nd or 3rd paragraph description that it's "built upon" or "powered by" or "makes use of." Even a footnote might be OK. This is pretty obviously the right thing to do, and it's also helpful to your users in understanding what your product is.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
Saying "thank you" and giving credit to someone who did you a solid is pretty universally a norm.
> 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.
Or, there's just the fraction of people who disregard and push back on norms.
> 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.
It's a bit different here, in that the people you cite are titans who developed ideas that might be a portion of a work... which is a bit different from using the work wholesale. I don't think anyone would expect Amazon to thank/cite/acknowledge something they used that comprised 1% of a product... but when it reaches a very high proportion it's time to mention it.
Further, these were academics. We do have a norm of citing them when we're deeply using and building upon their work academically.
> Saying "thank you" and giving credit to someone who did you a solid is pretty universally a norm.
How much time have you spent looking for counterexamples in the society where you live? Where people do something for the common good and most consumers do not say "Thank you". Have you done this exercise?
> Or, there's just the fraction of people who disregard and push back on norms
This is a convenient, self-fulfilling narrative. It is also pitting you into an adversarial position with someone. It's highly risky to insist on a norm and accuse others of not honoring it - and then be viewed as someone who is inflexible. It's your choice, though.
> How much time have you spent looking for counterexamples in the society where you live?
I've spent a whole lot of time thinking about norms and observing their observance, enforcement, and what kinds of circumstances they tend to be disregarded. I've read a lot of the lit, too, thank you.
> This is a convenient, self-fulfilling narrative.
So is refusing to acknowledge the existence of norms because some people refuse to acknowledge them. Ultimately, our social reality is something we pretend into existence together.
> It is also pitting you into an adversarial position with someone. It's highly risky to insist on a norm and accuse others of not honoring it - and then be viewed as someone who is inflexible. It's your choice, though.
Whinging that someone broke norm A [e.g. seemed ungrateful] and thinking less of people/entities that you've heard have done the same is pretty cheap and isn't likely to earn you value judgments yourself.
> I've spent a whole lot of time thinking about norms and observing their observance, enforcement, and what kinds of circumstances they tend to be disregarded. I've read a lot of the lit, too, thank you.
Then I hope you've noticed that there are instances in society where "Saying thank you and giving credit to someone who did you a solid" is not the norm.
> So is refusing to acknowledge the existence of norms because some people refuse to acknowledge them.
We are in agreement here.
> Whinging that someone broke norm A [e.g. seemed ungrateful] and thinking less of people/entities that you've heard have done the same is pretty cheap and isn't likely to earn you value judgments yourself.
I have no idea what you're trying to say here. This sounds precisely what people are doing: Whining that Amazon seemed ungrateful and thinking less of people who do likewise. Which is orthogonal to what I'm saying.
> > > It's highly risky to insist on a norm and accuse others of not honoring it
> This sounds precisely what people are doing: Whining that Amazon seemed ungrateful and thinking less of people who do likewise.
Yup, and while there's variation in the hivemind, all in all I don't think a very large fraction of it is snapping back and thinking of the author as inflexible. So p'raps it's not so highly risky.
> Crediting the work of a project you directly forked to create your own is a social norm in the open source world.
This is merely repeating the same statement over and over ("Yes it is" "No it isn't" "Yes it is" "No it isn't" ad nauseum). It's not furthering the conversation.
That Amazon decided to do it has no bearing on whether it is a norm or not.
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.
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".
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.
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.
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?
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.
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?
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.
Blink? Not an exact parallel, but afaik, google clearly gave credit to webkit. And I think Apple gave credit to KHTML for Webkit (and in fact worked with the khtml team for a while).
But even if FAANG don't typically give credit to projects they fork, that doesn't mean it is ok. That's like saying all the big political parties gerrymander, so gerrymandering is ok.
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.
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?
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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
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?
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.
>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.
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.
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.
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?
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).
not sure why you've been down-voted but I thought that was well explained. I do rather strongly disagree with your example as being relevant, but I think you've made a lot of good, relevant points. Your example of stimulus being a gift is incorrect. We explicitly pay into social programs as a society with full expectation that those funds will be used to help us. Stimulus isn't a gift.
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.
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.
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.
...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.
- I don't want to use restrictive (GPL) license like those business-hating FSF folks–I want people to use my software _freely_
- Hey! A big business used my software in a way that rubs me the wrong way (in this case, without giving prominent enough attribution)! Not nice!
What's not nice about it? You use a permissive license but you're going to get upset if people follow the letter of your license? This doesn't make sense. This might make sense if there were not alternative licenses but there are, and the author chose not to use them. This seems like playing a mind-game. "It's permissive! Use it how you like! (but I'm going to be upset if you don't follow the unwritten attribution guideline I have in my head)." How is it fair to expect other parties to meet your secret expectations?
What did AWS do wrong here? Were they supposed to know this guy's unwritten expectations?
There 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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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._
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.
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.
> 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.)
> 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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
The Flowplayer Free version is released under the GNU GENERAL PUBLIC LICENSE Version 3 (GPL).
The GPL requires that you not remove the Flowplayer logo and copyright notices from the user interface. See section 5.d below.
You may convey a work based on the Program, or the modifications to produce it from the Program, in the form of source code under the terms of section 4, provided that you also meet all of these conditions:
* If the work has interactive user interfaces, each must display Appropriate Legal Notices;
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
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.
> 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.)
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.
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.
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.
It's the same issue as taxes. They make buckets of money, use public infrastructure to do it, give pennies back. Apologists say why expect them to act different if the law let's them get away with it? How unreasonable of us.
Unity's license is what we're aiming for yeah? Use it freely but at a certain dollar threshold, contribute back monetarily?
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).
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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 reallyreally 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.
> 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.
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
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.
Ah, cool. It sounds like they have a specific way they want you to avoid modifying the text at the end of the paragraph about modifying it (for version 3):
> Rather than modifying the GPL, please use the exception mechanism offered by GPL version 3.
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?
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.
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.
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!
> 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.
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.
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.
- 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".