Re:Why Does Amazon.com Hate Open Source?
by recoiledsnake on Sunday September 09, 2012 @11:01AM
(#4495942)
Businesses do a somewhat simple cost benefit analysis. How much does X cost and how much revenue will X make us in the short and long run? Building software is not cheap in companies like Amazon. A trivial piece of software will end up costing multiple millions of dollars over the life of the product if you factor in support and maintenance and new versions.
So, it's a question of Linux server vs. desktop Linux, the latter of which has very less marketshare as to be a drop in the ocean of Amazon's revenues. They figure that the goodwill loss among desktop Linux users is not worth the effort to get their services working on Linux, since things like DRM for the movie streaming service is usually more tricky on Linux.
They do support Android though, so it shows that it's not about Open Source but about profitability. Many companies leveraging Open Source do not feel the need to give back more than for just that software in question, see Apple with no support for Open Source desktop at all, and wrapping the BSD stuff in heavy DRM on iOS. Tivoization is another egregious example. If companies weren't legally obligated to release some software under the GPL, they most likely won't. Google did not release their proprietary Linux kernel for the longest time(no idea if they have done it yet).
According to Gruber, who points it out snarkily, Amazon made only $7 million last quarter. http://daringfireball.net/linked/2012/07/27/amzn-profit-corr...
So, it's a question of Linux server vs. desktop Linux, the latter of which has very less marketshare as to be a drop in the ocean of Amazon's revenues. They figure that the goodwill loss among desktop Linux users is not worth the effort to get their services working on Linux, since things like DRM for the movie streaming service is usually more tricky on Linux.
They do support Android though, so it shows that it's not about Open Source but about profitability. Many companies leveraging Open Source do not feel the need to give back more than for just that software in question, see Apple with no support for Open Source desktop at all, and wrapping the BSD stuff in heavy DRM on iOS. Tivoization is another egregious example. If companies weren't legally obligated to release some software under the GPL, they most likely won't. Google did not release their proprietary Linux kernel for the longest time(no idea if they have done it yet).