Re:Amazon's cloud business is competing with its own customers
by simonh on Monday December 03, 2018 @04:28AM
(#18587437)
It's the difference between believing that what matters is user rights and sharing code, and believing that what matters is the world containing more cool stuff.
Tim O'Reilly has a story (which I'll probably butcher) where after publishing the BSD manuals as books he was accused by someone at a conference of stealing the author's work. One of the authors stood up and said something like "Actually what Tim is doing is exactly what we want - spreading the material as widely as possible and making it as useful as possible. We knew exactly what we were doing choosing that license".
It's the same spirit in which MacOS being based on BSD is fine, even if not a single line of code is shared back. The question isn't "What did Apple share back to BSD programmers recently?", it's "Is the world a better place with MacOS in it as something people can choose to use?".
The same applies to Amazon. It simply wouldn't have been possible to build something like Amazon purely on proprietary code, running only proprietary OSes and services. Even if they had, it would have been a lot less interesting. I think it's pretty clear that the world is a better place with services like AWS available. As long as they follow the licenses of the software they use, there isn't a problem, but if some licensors disagree they can always change their license.
Tim O'Reilly has a story (which I'll probably butcher) where after publishing the BSD manuals as books he was accused by someone at a conference of stealing the author's work. One of the authors stood up and said something like "Actually what Tim is doing is exactly what we want - spreading the material as widely as possible and making it as useful as possible. We knew exactly what we were doing choosing that license".
It's the same spirit in which MacOS being based on BSD is fine, even if not a single line of code is shared back. The question isn't "What did Apple share back to BSD programmers recently?", it's "Is the world a better place with MacOS in it as something people can choose to use?".
The same applies to Amazon. It simply wouldn't have been possible to build something like Amazon purely on proprietary code, running only proprietary OSes and services. Even if they had, it would have been a lot less interesting. I think it's pretty clear that the world is a better place with services like AWS available. As long as they follow the licenses of the software they use, there isn't a problem, but if some licensors disagree they can always change their license.