It's confusing to talk about Amazon as if it were a single acting agent. It seems to me as if someone there has just hired some overly enthusiastic lawyers, and top management/PR department hasn't realized how much it's hurting the company just yet.
This doesn't take away from the engineers that seem to have done a great job implementing S3/EC2 before the competition has much of anything comprable to offer.
If top management were paying attention, it would notice that that's a dumb, bad, evil thing to do. So, either top management is evil, or it's not paying attention.
This doesn't take away from the engineers that seem to have done a great job implementing S3/EC2 before the competition has much of anything comprable to offer.