I certainly didn't grok AWS for way too long.

And there was plenty of concern trolling about free shipping, eg "how long can they sustain this loss leader?!". Very long when you have free capital, certainly more than anyone else. It fortuitously parlayed into amazing customer retention and upselling. What Prof G (Scott Galloway) has coined the rundle (recurring revenue bundle). Proved so effective, in fact, that everyone's now doing subscriptions for everything.

We saw something similar in the 90s where health care prices plummeted as the now winners developed and convinced the public that their monopolies were good. Now they are able increase prices by 15-20%/yr into the foreseeable future.

This is not a prediction (per se), but a statement that we should realize that monopolistic might be good for the consumer in the short term but bad in the long term.

If you're referring to how Amazon Web Services was born out of the excess server capacity in their eCommerce service, this has been debunked as a myth [1]

Bezos knew what he was doing.

[1] https://www.networkworld.com/article/2891297/the-myth-about-...

HNers praise how great Amazon is for Graviton.

HNers praise how great Amazon is for leaving Azure and GCP on the dust.

HNers praise how great Amazon is for FOSS project XYZ.

HNers bash Amazon because yet another project made the wrong assumptions how to make money out of MIT/BSD style licenses.

Yep, I am seeing a pattern definitely.

I do not criticize or defend Amazon's parasitic relationship with FOSS. Frankly, I don't yet see how it can be any other way. I just merely acknowledge the plain truth. And that Amazon is better at this than the other belligerents.

While I'm a very happy Amazon Prime customer, I'd never be an employee or otherwise do business with Amazon. I just feel like there's no way for me to benefit proportionally. Per the parable of the lion's share.

> ...the wrong assumptions how to make money out of MIT/BSD style licenses.

Go on.

I'm hoping someone, anyone will discuss Peter Hintjens' (ZeroMQ) advice.

I have three projects in my back pocket. Once seen, their secret sauce is trivially reproduced. I can think of no way to publish them as anything other than FOSS. Not even as a service. Nor can I figure out how to pay rent working on them.

Which is a pity. These three tools are pretty neat.

Actually outside of the webdev bubble most companies are willing to pay for software too. SolarWinds in the news for all the wrong reasons now but their bread-and-butter was selling things to big corporations that webdevs would demand for free.

Any time I've seen it, it's glaringly obvious that HN users come down on both sides of the issue.

Pattern-matching detractors of your position as dominant in a particular venue's discussion is a common partisan failure mode. Doesn't mean you have to succumb to it.

On top of that, lots of discussion has become simply low-quality. The comments on technical posts turn into complaining about something not related to the technical content rather about the product. The amount of complaining and whining is through the roof. Mods should look into "Whine Wednesday" type threads to keep the off-topic whinings and complaining invading every single thread.

We should realize that we all succumb to the same biases when communicating in an online forum and exhibit the same tropes - exasperation at the loss of our 'secret hangout', frustration that companies we like get bashed repeatedly, and over-analyzing and drawing broad conclusions from strangers on the internet.

Try to enjoy the good responses and don't get so bothered by the rest! Or maybe there's another community that is more enjoyable out there. Personally I can put up with some of the noise and repeated points like yours because there's still plenty of value for me in these posts. Best of luck.