
The Cloud and Open Source - jcurbo
https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/201x/2019/09/21/AWS-Open-Source-People
======
drieddust
His conclusion reveals the intentions pretty clearly.

> Google Cloud’s recent Open Source partnerships are interesting. I look at
> that list of companies and it’s not obvious to me that they’re going to
> offer better operational excellence than Google’s, but maybe I’m wrong. It’s
> an interesting and probably useful experiment.

This is true spirit of Amazon i.e partners are competition to be killed.

> At the end of the day I’m not that worried. Most of us who’ve open-sourced
> stuff love the creative process for its own sake; touching and improving
> other engineers’ lives. The skillset evidenced by having done so will
> probably help you get really good jobs.

Wow I am just amazed at the callousness of this suggestion. So he wants
developers to create good software out of love and free of cost and then toil
for his company while he mint the customers. At least he is transparent about
his intentions.

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ak217
I have a lot of respect for the AWS team, but...

> one insanely-complex routine task that we do all the time is hiring. You
> know what the LPs are at hiring time? A checklist. Now even the typical all-
> day interview marathon isn’t gonna reliably dig into every LP, but we do an
> acceptable job of taking a close look at enough of them. I believe that’s
> very helpful in bringing down the asshole ratio.

In my personal and second degree experience with Amazon and AWS hiring, the
application of the LPs by interviewers doesn't work nearly as well as most of
them seem to think, and it often devolves into a mostly arbitrary hazing
ritual. I'm willing to believe that AWS has fewer assholes, and that you can't
excel at operations while an asshole, but I've seen too many bar raisers who
acted as arrogant know-it-alls and made completely capricious, arbitrary and
damaging decisions.

~~~
swiftcoder
> I'm willing to believe that AWS has fewer assholes, and that you can't excel
> at operations while an asshole...

Having spent a two year tour in AWS, I think it's fair to say AWS has a pretty
decent monopoly on assholes, and that they excel at operations despite that.

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redwood
What an incredibly self serving glimpse into the the mind of a member of the
empire du jour.

I'm sure Microsoft engineers felt similarly about democratizing computation in
the 90s. Then the quote would have been "People just want point and click
ease... They don't care about who their software dollars go to".

And yea. That's right. People don't vote fairly with their dollars. That's
where regulators come in to ensure a level playing field.

"Embrace, extend, extinguish". Never forget. We've seen this show before.

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dhd415
This strikes me as a bit of a straw man -- "AWS has operational skill. Open
source companies with managed service offerings of their software probably do
not." The operational skills that AWS has are primarily at the infrastructure
layer. If my experience with their managed software services and the tons of
complaints in their support forums are any indication, their operational
excellence drops off dramatically at the software layer. I don't fault AWS for
trying to move up the value chain, but bashing on open source companies as
"not a viable business model" distracts from the real question of who can
delivery a better managed software offering on top of AWS's (or GCP's or
Azure's) managed hardware platform.

~~~
scarface74
So you’re judging quality by support forum posts? Isn’t that the very
definition of a self selected sample? Who goes into a _support_ forum to post
about how well something is working?

~~~
thayne
You can see how the company responds to customer problems though.

~~~
scarface74
Not really, in the case of AWS, if you’re running a business depending on it,
you’re not depending on getting help from a public forum, you have at least a
business support contract where you get immediate, live support from people
who can see your account, do a screen share with you etc. my experience with
AWS is that they are batting close to 100.

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thayne
So AWS, if your chief advantage is your operations, then why not open source
both improvements you make to third party open source products and your own
products? It seems like it wouldn't help your competitors that much since they
don't have your operational expertise, and it would help your customers a lot,
since they could have a better understanding of how the products work, and
even make contributions to fix bugs that effect them, instead of waiting for
the amazon team to make it down the backlog.

I get not wanting to pay for the open source software you use. I don't get why
so little code is contributed back upstream.

~~~
discodave
Why would you open source the thing you're selling as your competitive
advantage?

Amazon is a business, not a charity.

~~~
thayne
The software is not what Amazon sells, and from what I can tell as an outsider
AWS's competitive advantage primarily comes from infrastructure, operational
skill, and economies of scale.

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miles_matthias
Point taken -- AWS is better at ops than the developers who create open source
tools.

Then why not pay a fraction of the money you're earning on offering these
tools back to the open source community? Using something like GitHub's new
funding tools?

~~~
sg47
And why not contribute changes made to these projects back to the community?
This is robbery at best camouflaged as benevolence.

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ArtWomb
That's an interesting story re: early twitter. Are you certain a MySQL SLA-
level support contract would have solved their scalability issues? My
understanding is that it was high volume of highly followed participants that
led to congestion. I.e. a design problem. Eventually solved by caching and
fanning out replicated tweet data to all followers.

To see the issues around cloud and open source right now, you only have to
look at who's winning: enterprise consultants such as Dell EMC, HPe,
Accenture, IBM, etc.

They are the ones pushing broad K8S adoption at the edge. And in the next
generation it will probably come down to a new crop of ISVs to solve issues
around data portability, vendor lock-in, security, pricing arbitrage, and
training.

~~~
evanweaver
> Are you certain a MySQL SLA-level support contract would have solved their
> scalability issues?

This pitch may have been mentioned in passing to me but I don't remember. From
the perspective of I and many others who ultimately solved the scalability
issues, the MySQL boat was simultaneously sinking and on fire, while nobody
knew who the captain was supposed to be. An insurance policy that promised
that somebody with a badge would dedicate 8 hours a month to buffing out
scratches was not useful.

It was less "it's OSS, we don't need to pay" and more "only God can help us
now".

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tannhaeuser
I give AWS employees the benefit of innovation eg. inventing "the cloud" as we
know it today, but what's in there for developers? What are the incentives for
F/OSS software developers if all they contribute to is monopolization, lock-
in, and attention economy? tbray wants to appeal to an F/OSS ethos that has
run its course and just doesn't make sense in the cloud economy. I'd go
further and say F/OSS has ruined the software industry in that it has made
software a commodity, so the only way to make a living is by operations,
taking away economic value from developers, and giving it to cloud providers
instead. That's obviously not a sustainable model for software development
going forward, and creates incentives that are neither aligned with those of
developers nor customers.

Well, AWS at least offers the marketplace for indie developers to offer their
images (with a markup for billing which is ok I guess). If AWS is serious
about a sustainable economic model for software developers, then they could
start to expand this offering and make it more prominent (I haven't heard much
about it in a long while), building it on mainstream Linux distros rather than
AWS Linux, etc. What I'm seeing on AWS marketplace and places such as
DockerHub, though, are mostly repackaged F/OSS convenience builds rather than
original applications. And AWS could have made a stance here by selling eg.
Mongo DB images from the marketplace rather than going for Mongo's customers
with their own offering. I guess it's better than on Azure and Google Cloud at
least, where you need a partnership deal to even be able to sell images.

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zzzeek
what's the point of this? open source is not a business model, or it's not
relevant, or you shouldn't expect it to be a career... or something? does it
matter perhaps that AWS and most every other cloud company is running most of
what they have on Linux which is...um, open source? I was not able to follow
what point this article was trying to make. something about if you're not a
nice person you can't do ops....OK ? being a nice person is generally helpful
in a lot of ways, right?

~~~
sg47
He's saying that the schmucks who created the open-source software are not
smart enough to operate it or make a business out of it. Only AWS with all its
operational expertise is capable of operating it. The open source developers
shouldn't even try to make a business out of it. Rather than going to
Confluent and saying "I don't want to worry about Kafka again", they want the
customer to come to AWS which is fine except that AWS did zilch to contribute
to Kafka. If the creators of the open source software want to make a business
out of it, who's Amazon to come and say that they don't have operational
expertise?

~~~
Rapzid
Also they contribute to open source too. 'Cause ops wheel. Game changer, 2020.
Don't laugh.

Seriously though it's hard to not read between the lines on this. There seems
to be more between the lines than lines somehow. I need a shower to rinse the
bias off me now.

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lawzup
You know what I like about Amazon? I'm a <i>customer<i>. I pay my money (not
much) and you give me what I want (enough for me). I deal with Google and lots
of other Big Tech companies too, but I never forget that I'm not the customer
there. "The TV business is like the chicken business: the chickens think that
because they get fed, they're the customers."

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jonaf
New business model idea: write open source software with a license that
requires, well, a license to _operate_. It's free in all the typical APL2
senses, except that you can't sell it "as a service" without signing,
effectively, a "lease." Now, supposing the project gains sufficient popularity
/ community / traction, all you have to do is wait for Amazon to take note of
the project and contact you for a lease. You ask for 30% and retire. And if
they invent a competing project that is at all API-compatible, they have to
prove in court that they haven't plagiarized any of your open source code;
but, that wouldn't happen anyway, since by their own admission, they're not
focused on writing software, they're focused on operating it.

Someone with experience/knowledge in this area tell me if I'm off my rocker. I
know it sounds too simple. But why wouldn't this work?

~~~
jakelazaroff
Aren't you basically describing SSPL? That's MongoDB's license that does
pretty much what you're describing, except it's not considered open source
[1]. And in response, Amazon created an API-compatible alternative called
DocumentDB [2]. There's also the Commons Clause [3], which I think Redis Labs
uses to license its Redis satellite products.

[1] [https://www.zdnet.com/article/mongodb-open-source-server-
sid...](https://www.zdnet.com/article/mongodb-open-source-server-side-public-
license-rejected/)

[2] [https://aws.amazon.com/documentdb/](https://aws.amazon.com/documentdb/)

[3] [https://commonsclause.com/](https://commonsclause.com/)

~~~
jonaf
This looks like a great case-study. Basically, it seems that if the licensing
isn't in Amazon's favor (take the OSS project, put it into operation, sell it
as a service), then Amazon is likely to simply build their own implementation
that is API-compatible. It remains unclear whether the ROI for this exists,
especially for larger/more complex projects, but the precedent is very
discouraging for my idea.

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aoeu123UE
You've got to be kidding, for 99% of the projects out there a dedicated server
will have the same uptime as an EC2 VM, for a tenth of the price, and
unlimited bandwidth. AWS is a plain ripoff and any field expert with a bit of
critical thinking would not fall in the trap for long.

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pnako
tl;dr "Fuck you but thanks for the software"

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thisguyuknow
I use and contribute to open source, and I know I can't compete with Amazon in
terms of operational excellence, and that operations is where the value lies
in this unregulated cluster-fuck of douchebaggery that is the modern software
world. I'm already very aware, Tim, that if I make something useful, and I
open source it and try to make a business out of it, some asshole like you
will come along and deploy it at scale and market the hell out of it and tell
me I'm cute for even trying, and that you just might throw an Amazon job my
way if I'm lucky. This kind of arrogance makes me think twice about
contributing to open source, and it makes me hope your arrogance runs up
against something intractable, and soon.

