There's surely a space between "perfectly acceptable" and "illegal"? I don't like this idea that you have no right to complain about something if you haven't specifically banned it in a legally enforceable license.
But then it depends on what kind of people with what kind of mindset make such decisions, doesn't it? (Hint: It's not the altruistic "share with everyone" mindset they have.)
I don't think that's entirely true. Large companies respond to public pressure over things all the time. Some of the better run ones also take the initiative to do things ethically off the bat. If a large company is treating "legal" as "morally acceptable" then we should be calling them out on this, not accepting as part of being a large company.
We should certainly also update legislation to force them to do things ethically, but it's not always possible to cover every possible case and thus our society depends on at least some level of corporate ethics.
> I don't think that's entirely true. Large companies respond to public pressure over things all the time.
That type of response to pressure isn't necessarily of a moral nature. If your customers are boycotting you for not including skub in your product, your choice to include skub in the future could simply be an effort to maintain your customer base, regardless of what moral values skub (non-)inclusion represents.
If that were true then big companies wouldn't have PR departments. But they do, because public image does actually matter to them. Brand recognition & emotional response to those brands is a huge part of being a big company.
In this case, the author can set out what they think is acceptable in their license terms. Attribution costs nothing to the user - so if you want it, stick it in your license.
People should be able to comfortably use software within the bounds of the license without worrying about the author coming along and then shaming them for not complying with an additional set of implicit constraints.
Yes, it would have been nice for Amazon to acknowledge the original author. But given that they are not obligated to, it's unfair to act as if they are at fault for not doing so.
A credit-to-author clause has been tried before by the tech community, and IMO it's up to the community and not an individual author to develop a license which fits. The reason is because any modification to a well-known agreement makes your license very expensive to understand, even if it's a trivial modification.
Open source licenses only work because the community adopts them as a standard.
I'd agree with this — with things like Creative Commons it's very clear if someone is asking for attribution or not, if it allows non commercial etc.
In an enterprise company, it's _much_ easier to use something with an established licence. Having "MIT with attribution" might be waved through by a standing policy. Having "my custom MIT fork" needs Legal involved & may not be a hill to die on so just get ditched instead.
I think it comes back to politeness, somewhere in amazon there is product manager that saw or was shown Tim's repo and saw an opportunity(nothing wrong with that). It would have been a nice thing to do to give him a shoutout just like it was a nice thing to do of Tim's to release his code under a permissive license. There must be a mountain of code forked by large companies that if given some sort of recognition would be of benefit to the original author even if its only internet points.
There has to be daylight between legal "fault" or obligation and courtesy. The author isn't going on a tirade, he made a quip.
We have faculties, as humans, that aren't strictly legible in the way a license or legal code is. Laws are not a substitute for custom or courtesy. We do need both. No one said they stole. They said they were discourteous.
But the author had the opportunity to specify the behaviour that he felt was courteous enough. Some people do not care about shout-outs, and those people do not include attribution clauses in their code licenses.
I also did not mean "fault" in the legal sense, but rather in the sense of courtesy. It is not a faux pas to comply neatly with the terms of a public contract. What you're suggesting is that Amazon erred in not mentioning the author, but the fact that is visible to everyone in the license is that the author does not care about attribution.
I don't like the insinuation that a license can be non-exhaustive in its conditions for the "correct" use of open-source software. You shouldn't run the risk of offending an author by violating some tacit, contradictory rule.
> But the author had the opportunity to specify the behaviour that he felt was courteous enough.
So I'm free to treat you like an absolutely piece of shit, be a raging asshole at you, and you're going to defend my horrendous treatment of you just because legally I'm allowed to and you failed to make a contract with me saying I have to be nice in excruciating detail that's legally enforceable?
Do you also dislike interacting with people, seeing how there's no such thing as an exhaustive list of things to do and not to do?
This is not even an analogy, it's what is being discussed. AWS didn't do anything illegal with regards to their usage of open-source, but we live in a society, and we do have innumerable tacit rules. One of them is that you should give credit to where credit is due.
Software licensing already breaks many tacit rules that people normally take for granted. It's rude to copy someone else's creation without asking first - but if they license their code in a way that allows for copies to be created, it is no longer rude to copy that code without permission.
It is also rude to sell someone else's work without permission. But if they choose a software license without a non-commercial clause, it is no longer rude: and this implies that the absence of a feature in a license is a kind of approval of its opposite.
If you choose a license without an attribution clause in it, you are admitting, publicly, that you do not care about attribution - not that you require, nor that you forbid it, just that you are ambivalent. If somebody goes on to use your code without attribution, you are wrong to then point out that they have been "rude" to you, because you have already declared your indifference.
I'm not suggesting that unwritten rules are bad. I'm suggesting that trying to introduce unwritten rules to a system where written rules (i.e. licenses) already exist is a bad thing. Software licensing already sits at the intersection of legal and social obligations, because attribution is a feature with essentially no legal impact; treating a software license as a social contract is not a mistake.
IDK... lets remember that this is a low stakes game. At worst, someone is now cross with aws product people.
Also, it's not like we're talking about arcane pleasantries that no one could have anticipated. Say JKRR opens Harry Potter, copyleft or something. You record an audio version and sell it with great success. Is it not obviously courteous to mention her in some way?
It's even moreso, if you are aws, and JKR is just a regular author.
It's not like anyone who uses a library is expected to perform a ritual dance. It's common sense basics and if you get it wrong nothing happens. Doesn't seem like a lot to ask.
If I look through the menus of my oldish (not smart) Panasonic flatscreen tv, there is a menu option that displays all the licenses of the open source software used.
> There's surely a space between "perfectly acceptable" and "illegal"?
If there is, it's a space that you can minimize using licensing terms, and as a user I will assume that the licensing terms are chosen by the authors in a fashion that best represents their interests. Especially since so many template licenses exist that address this exact problem.
> I don't like this idea that you have no right to complain about something if you haven't specifically banned it in a legally enforceable license.
I think it's unfair to imply that the post you respond to represents that idea, if that's what you're doing. Although worded frankly, it's a constructive suggestion for what proprietors can do to prevent this. It's not a new problem.
I would prefer to see these things enforced by culture and norms rather than laws and licenses. I don't want to have to parse legalese as part of my role as an engineer. I don't want companies to have to hire more lawyers to verify they can use software I wrote. I want them to be able to just use it, then contribute back after they've experienced using it. I don't want a restrictive license may prevent them from ever even trying my software in the first place. I want culture and norms that encourage the company to contribute to the project, not laws.
For person-to-person interactions or small communities. Unwritten rules don't work for corporations. They're driven by what's profitable and (not even always) what's legal.
If Jeff Bezos has a $50 meal at a restaurant and tips $0, would you blame the restaurant for not having a mandatory tipping policy? Or would you blame Jeff Bezos for cheaping out and not following the community norm?
Would a restrictive open-source license even have stopped them? Would any American court fine an American mega-company over something like this?
How does that even work, anyway? If the developer were outside of America, would it still have to be taken to the country where the company resides? There's no international court I know of that would handle these kind of things.
Thanks. But is this standard to abbreviate to APLv2? I only knew the language APL and the apache license is normally abbreviated apache-v2, or so, isnt it?
Not really. The conversation goes on as long as we like. Part of OSS is about trust and reputation. AWS could have really helped the maintainer with a single sentence and they didn't.
It's like not saying thanks to the barista when you get your coffee. Not the end of the world, but it's still a touch rude.
When you are a huge company you have to be careful about saying thanks to Barista.
Maybe the developers would like to say thanks to barista but lawyers said to the developers to not talk to the barista no matter what since it's safer to say nothing than risk saying something wrong.
> AWS could have really helped the maintainer with a single sentence and they didn't.
It's not befitting a large enterprise like AWS to tell their prospective customers that they are just wrapping their infra around free software in their marketing copy. If that single sentence even slightly impresses upon .1% of their potential customers that they ought to spin it up on their own infrastructure, obviating their need to pay for the service, that's plenty of disincentive to add the message.
That’s not as clear cut as your post may make it seem. Some users (me, for example) are more inclined to use a hosted service of some open source software than of some proprietary piece. Because that gives me a migration option if the providers service no longer fits my needs. For example, I’m paying four digits a month for some hosted Postgres database.
Misses the point. The marketing copy there is to bamboozle the uninformed into opening their wallets. If you are better informed, you already know that AWS plagiars pretty much all it's services from open-source. A smaller player catering to a tech audience might add open source to its bullet points as some sort of virtue signalling, but that's no benefit to the established megalith that is AWS.
Amazon's entire cloud business revolves around providing managed infrastructure as an alternative to self hosted solutions, so I don't think that is really a secret regardless.
Also, consider that they rely on having a positive reputation to attract engineering talent and also to continue to get third party developers to release their infrastructural code under permissive licenses.
The model where company makes money off of someone else's work without paying them should be illegal. Currently you cannot hire someone as an apprentice and don't pay them - you need to give at least the minimum wage. OSS is sort of a loophole where companies can obtain work without payment. I think this practice should be illegal and regardless of the license company adopting OSS solution should pay its contributors market rates - that is the amount of money it would take AWS to pay to create such product.
I appreciate the underlying sentiment, but I disagree. When I contribute to OSS it's my choice to and I want the right to let anyone do whatever they want with code even if I never exercise that right.
Personally, I think OSS licences should be changed to prohibit unpaid use by any entity that has a single stakeholder worth more than a billion dollars. That way the startups and medium sized businesses around the world can benefit and the tech lottery winners pay something reasonable ($1m a year, say) to support OSS.
There is the same argument that people who want apprenticeship use. They want to work for a company and learn, but company won't hire them because they don't have money to pay for "idle" worker and the overhead to teach them.
But this is for the greater good. In the past you had companies who used their market share in particular city to drive wages down and people had a choice either work for them and starve or move to different city. Minimum wage stops this, at a cost of some people being unable to work for free. I can accept that.
There will be projects for sure that would love their software were used by AWS and other companies without paying them, but that will only create a race to the bottom. We should stop exploitation of engineers by these giant companies.
This is an edge case, but for sure they would have family members who would inherit the titles and in an event of absence of such people then the state should take ownership.
If trust and reputation were enough, we would not need licenses. The GPL is great and had the impact it did exactly because it forced people to do things.
You're not legally required to say "Hi" when you run into people you know and making it legally enforceable would be a legal nightmare, but it's the decent thing to do.
However, if a company that uses some OSS stuff is not under a moral obligation to do so? If not so, then why do we do OSS with licenses? Why not just Copyright everything?
Not really, it's about Amazon not being a great OSS citizen. They don't have to be but it's a combination of immature, rude, and unprofessional to not be like that if your core business is packaging up and integrating other people's OSS software.
They are of course well within their rights as per the license to behave like this but there's a notion of being courteous, grateful, and constructive in the OSS world that comes with being a responsible OSS citizen and that goes a long way to ensure people volunteer to help you out with bugs, support, change requests, etc. It doesn't cost anything to just reach out and give this person some kudos. It's the right thing to do.
Amazon is being a bit insensitive here and this sounds to me like somebody up high ought to do a bit of yelling internally about acting professionally and not needlessly burning bridges with the OSS people that they depend on for their core business. At least I'd be all over this if I were confronted with this kind of behavior by one of my colleagues. Not cool. A public apology would go a long way to fixing this; maybe a couple of lines in the readme. Doesn't cost a thing.
This is analogous to "hey, fella, I have a First Amendment protects right to be a manipulative, sociopathic liar" - it's true, and it doesn't invalidate people complaining about your behavior.
AWS did something rude, unprofessional, and indicative of bad OSS citizenship. The fact that the lawyers can sign off on it is irrelevant.
I have no problem with that, but don't pretend that someone is abusing your license when you didn't stipulate.
If fact someone should come up with a well written licence that adds conditions when the licensee revenue is over a certain (large) amount, like say royalties. Everyone should be happy with that.
Because all the author wanted was credit, and there's no appropriate license for that. The 4 clause BSD license has dropped out of favor for several good reasons and nothing else has taken its place.
You know that licenses are able to be written and rewritten right? If someone wanted attribution, someone could hire a lawyer and make a license (or make an edit/fork of an existing license) that does what someone needs.
Giving attribution (and monetary compensation) to the lawyers who make open source licensing function is also a thing.
He wrote some code and gave it away freely, and all he wanted was a thank you. You say he should have hired a lawyer to write his own license. This is absurd.
If that's what he wanted what stopped him from adding one more paragraph to the licence saying something similar to:
"The USER is required to publicly thank AUTHOR, and make the thanking reproducible in every copy of the derived work that uses this software."
You don't need a lawyer for that. And if someone wants to use his work without attribution, they are free to negotiate a copy with different licence terms directly with the author and provide a compensation.
The whole point of these highly permissive licenses is that we don't want to constrain independent hackers, or put people in a position where they are unsure if their fork might expose them to liability.
It is undoubtedly discourteous of AWS to release an OSS fork as a new feature without crediting the original author. It is not the end of the world. It is not a reason to go and change your licenses to make things more difficult for the other 95% of developers. But it is a reason to say "some people at AWS are just dang ol' jerks."
The author needs to decide what's more important then, getting a pat on the back, or contributing to OSS. It's pretty crappy using a permissive license so companies are willing to use the software, then trying to make them look bad for not following unwritten rules.
Companies want to take and exploit free/opensource licenses in exactly this way.
By putting in a clause for attribution for example, you winnow away the companies like Amazon who would totally want to fork and re-release without crediting you.
If a company doesn't want to credit you, and your license is dissuading them from forking your project, then the non-standard license has achieved its goal.
You can't have it both ways. It's like people complaining that the GPL is "viral". That's the whole point of it. Companies that don't want to re-contribute their source changes are dissuaded from using it at all.
If you put an attribution clause in the license, the companies that don't touch your code is the company you never wanted to use your code at all. You can't have it both ways. You can't say "I need the exposure so I use a totally permissive license" and then say "Oh but I actually want attribution in a way that if people knew about this requirement, wouldn't use it to begin with"
I haven’t been keeping up with what licenses are popular, but I’m curious about this because The BSD license was my favorite a few decades ago. Can you please elaborate why it dropped out of favor?
The BSD license is still popular, but in its 3 clause or 2 clause form, without the attribution clause.
The main reason it was dropped was because it created an incompatibility with the GPL. The other reason was because operating systems became an unwieldy mess of attributions.
Taking permissively licensed open source code without so much of an attribution obviously sucks, but I can’t quite see the evidence that this is a fork? Same concept, sure. Code generated is similar but different enough, and there aren’t really many ways to express the similar bits... Interface isn’t exactly breakthrough either, anyone would have used a textarea + buttons. (Only looked at the screenshots.)
Can someone check the source code of the extension?
(It's certainly weird that 30+ comments in, everyone else is taking sides without even questioning the IMO not terribly well supported premise.)
It is the same code - Someone on Twitter noticed that if you download the Chrome extension and look in the notices.txt file of that bundle, the first line reads puppeteer-recorder v0.7.2
It does seem like the license should have asked for a mention if that's what he wanted.
However. He has every right to point out that they are using his code. And I think it would be at least polite to mention that, and it is in my opinion impolite not to mention it.
And actually a little misleading when they don't mention using an open source system that is similar.
And it's not like the fact that he didn't say that in his license means he is not allowed to mention he made that software.
So I think better late than never, put the requirements you want in the license for credit. Or go AGPL or whatever. Although obviously that's not retroactive on the previous version.
This also proves that someone thinks it's a business. So I feel like there might be an opportunity to launch a competitor, with a main advantage that they have the actual talent that created the system.
Worth noting: he _has_ a competing business. It was started before Amazon launched theirs in fact. Checkly, his startup, does synthetic monitoring, which Amazon got into after he was already into it.
It won't take long until OSI heads come in and tell you that sort of licensing isn't "Open Source" (a commonly used term they bogusly claim exclusive control over). Who's financing OSI again?
AGPL in no way prevents anyone to use the licensed software. It just demands, like GPL, that modifications be made available to users, but in addition to GPL, extends this duty to the case where the licensed software is used remotely/as a service (rather than "distributed" to users for use on their own computer).
No need to mention them by name. Just use the AGPL, for they are all irrationally allergic to it.
EDIT: notice that usage of the AGPL produces the desired effect, while still being free software (which it wouldn't be the case if you excluded specific users in your license terms).
AGPL may go too far sometimes, as to intimidate companies from using an opensource project internally, and not necessarily as a (user-facing) service as in the case with the OP and AWS.
That's due to fact that AGPL's _user interaction_ clauses can be too vague in legal terms, in a way that many internal use cases could be litigated as a user interaction over a network.
2. Grant of Copyright License. Subject to the terms and conditions of
this License, each Contributor hereby grants to You a perpetual,
worldwide, non-exclusive, no-charge, royalty-free, irrevocable
copyright license to reproduce, prepare Derivative Works of,
publicly display, publicly perform, sublicense, and distribute the
Work and such Derivative Works in Source or Object form
if you wanted a nod, add a "give me a nod if you fork" clause, you're allowed to.
IANAL, but I believe that may make your license practically unenforceable, because all precedents can be argued to not apply because of that change, and even if untrue, just having that sort of argument in court quickly gets prohibitively expensive.
There are some replies in this thread that misunderstood the content of Tim Nolet's twitter post. (Probably because the short headline has pitchfork raising overtones.)
- He's not complaining that Amazon forked his code with Apache license. He admits he also uses other open source with permissive licenses
- He just thought it would be nice/courteous/polite/etc if Amazon acknowledge/recognized/credited/mentioned/thanked his original project that they forked from.
The twitter reply of "user facing open source should have been AGPL" and replies in this thread of "you used the wrong license" don't really cover it.
In other words, I'm not aware of a permissive license that's the same as BSD/Apache with the only difference in that also says "use it as you wish but you must mention my name when you're a commercial enterprise making a splashy product announcement".
It seems they did, just in a not obvious place. The thing with legal documents is that, if it's not in the document, you can't expect it to be adhered to. This gets hairy when opposing parties have different ideas of what "norms" are, aka "unspoken/unwritten expectations", as we see here.
> There are some replies in this thread that misunderstood the content of Tim Nolet's twitter post.
> [...] (reasons)
Well, then why go on something as big and public like Twitter and HN to post about it in the first place? Send a mail to the team of AWS and get in touch. I don't get the point of this tweet, either.
Motivate them to be mindful of the shoulders they stand on. The bad PR is that this at-a-glance anti-Amazon post is at the top of a popular tech forum.
The OP seems to be disappointed with how they handled it, and an Amazon agent even replied to agree and apologize. Plus, this is not the first time that people have reported similar feelings about Amazon's lack of appreciation for the permissive open source code they use.
> what do you think they are apparently obligated to do?
I don't know exactly, but I think it starts with making efforts to maintain good relationships with the open source community members who work for free to enable Amazon's (and others) products to exist. Regardless of whether they explicitly demand it up front.
Yes I remember there was a similar scenario with Microsoft as well.
> In other words, I'm not aware of a permissive license that's the same as BSD/Apache with the only difference in that also says "use it as you wish but you must mention my name when you're a commercial enterprise making a splashy product announcement".
Yes. What we need is ABSD, AMIT or AAPL where the first A stands for appreciation / Attribution
Oh the good old companies paying in exposure... If you make a profit from using someone else software you should pay them (plus appropriate tax) regardless of the software license.
It's not a loophole. A loophole is when you have some case or situation not covered by the rules allowing someone to get away with something that the rules were not meant to allow.
E.g., a company arranging for its shareholders to be able to report dividends as capital gains rather than ordinary income by doing a fractional stock split followed by a mandatory buyback instead of declaring a dividend, with the split/buyback designed so that each shareholder ends up with exactly the same percentage ownership they had before and with cash equal to the exact amount that would have been otherwise distributed as a dividend [1], that's a loophole.
An author picking an open source license that specifically and intentionally allows anyone to use their software and make money from it without having to give the author anything is not a loophole.
[1] Yes, this actually happened around 100 years ago. The rules on buybacks were changed to fix it. But them some legitimate cases of buybacks that should have been capital gains became ordinary income, so more fixes were needed. The result is that what once needed at most a line in the tax code, if it even needed mention at all, became several paragraphs. This is why we do not have a small, simple tax code--there is a massive incentive for people to find even the tiniest loophole and exploit it, and so you end up with multiple paragraphs for things you at first would think could be done in a sentence. (And don't say a flat tax would help...almost all of the complexity in the tax code is in determining what gets taxes, not how much the tax is once you have figured out the what).
All of my enduring open source contributions have been made while employed by a big(ish) company. I went through the effort to get them upstreamed so other people wouldn't have to make the same effort to debug and fix the same issues. Does that enable other companies to avoid hiring engineers to do the same work? Maybe, but it also enables everyone to benefit from things working just a bit better.
I don't need a royalty from my fixes, I was compensated for my time. I don't even care about a credit, but I understand some do.
Am I crazy for wanting a license that prohibits the free use of a project by mega-corps? "If you're a company valued > $XXX usage of this code is prohibited".
I guess I can see OSS as a "free food" stall. Almost everyone can have a bite but I'm not fine with billionaires coming in to steal the recipes. They already have the means to increase their wealth efficiently, society would have much benefit if these mechanisms of wealth increase involved giving some of it back.
It's the same issue as taxes. They make buckets of money, use public infrastructure to do it, give pennies back. Apologists say why expect them to act different if the law let's them get away with it? How unreasonable of us.
Unity's license is what we're aiming for yeah? Use it freely but at a certain dollar threshold, contribute back monetarily?
Congratulations, you've just reinvented the original BSD-4 license! It included what was called the "obnoxious advertising clause".
> 3. All advertising materials mentioning features or use of this software must display the following acknowledgement: This product includes software developed by the <organization>.
There's a good reason why we no longer use BSD-4 anymore.
> The result is a plethora of licenses, requiring a plethora of different sentences. When people put many such programs together in an operating system, the result is a serious problem. Imagine if a software system required 75 different sentences, each one naming a different author or group of authors. To advertise that, you would need a full-page ad. This might seem like extrapolation ad absurdum, but it is actual fact. In a 1997 version of NetBSD, I counted 75 of these sentences. (Fortunately NetBSD has decided to stop adding them, and to remove those it could.)
The advertising clause is inherently problematic to integrators, distributions, and packagers, which are an important part of the community. For a distribution, having to acknowledge 1,000+ authors in all promotional materials is unrealistic. Worse, it won't be a problem initially, but only after most people had noticed this trend: they would want their acknowledgements too, and everyone would start adding advertising clauses, in the end - everyone spams all posters with credit and nobody gains any notability, it's kind of a tragedy of the commons. The only way to stop this problem is explicitly discouraging everyone from using it.
A idea is to reword and relax this license: Similar to LGPL, you can skip the acknowledgement if it's used in an unmodified form. But it doesn't really solve the problem - if the original project has been forked by the community, the exception becomes useless again. The next problem is that, it doesn't really cover all cases - in a previous incident involved Microsoft, Microsoft didn't even use a single line of the original code at all, it was just an inspiration from its framework, and the author was upset for not receiving any acknowledgement... Another idea is using AGPL's approach and targets cloud providers only, but still, it doesn't cover all the cases here.
I'm not sure whether using copyright to require acknowledgement is a good idea after all. In the academia, copyright and credit/attribution are two entirely independent process. The credit is not a legal matter, but simply a form of code of conduct and informal politeness. Perhaps promoting a code of conduct for acknowledgement in the industry regarding the use of FOSS could work better.
Ok, we should fork at convenience without taking care how was made something. Because "the company" only takes care on your LICENSE file and fu.. the maintainers or collaborators on it.
If we always come with excuses like "Oh, wait but it's not specified somewhere I can copy, appropriate it and sell it as mine". Fu..! Because looks like we need to protect* our self of companies instead of trust them. So OSS doesn't make sense.
So now turns out that there are no people managing decisions like this. Come on, credits are not a fu..ing problem and are free of cost!
Because it’s a great idea but for instance the Linux kernel would have to come with documentation that mentions the tens of thousands of authors. A massive undertaking that doesn’t help anyone, really.
Documentation is not the problem. The problem is that, the advertising clause requires ALL promotional materials to include these acknowledgements, for ALL software that has been used in the software. It was not a problem for BSD back then, since UCB was the only developer. But for projects with multiple copyright owners, such as the Linux kernel, a Linux distro poster would contain a thousand lines of acknowledgements, and this is not even counting the packages in the userspace.
A modern revisiting would probably require crediting the project as a whole rather than each individual author, and maybe have separate consideration for products that derive from a large number of such projects.
The primary problem is that 4-clause BSD is incompatible with the GPL since it adds restrictions to distributing the software (notably the advertising clause)
This license is also sometimes called the “4-clause BSD license”.
This is a lax, permissive non-copyleft free software license with a serious flaw: the “obnoxious BSD advertising clause”. The flaw is not fatal; that is, it does not render the software nonfree. But it does cause practical problems, including incompatibility with the GNU GPL.
The Flowplayer Free version is released under the GNU GENERAL PUBLIC LICENSE Version 3 (GPL).
The GPL requires that you not remove the Flowplayer logo and copyright notices from the user interface. See section 5.d below.
You may convey a work based on the Program, or the modifications to produce it from the Program, in the form of source code under the terms of section 4, provided that you also meet all of these conditions:
* If the work has interactive user interfaces, each must display Appropriate Legal Notices;
> Linux is GPL and I doubt it would have tens of thousands of authors if it were not.
Why? There's plenty of permissive F/OSS projects with large numbers of contributors.
> It would have a dozen proprietary forks.
Probably, but proprietary forks don't stop F/OSS contributions. They can even be the source of them, as upstreaming everything that isn't secret sauce reduced the cost of maintaining the proprietary fork. A number of the big sources of F/OSS contributions to Postgres are maintainers of proprietary downstream distributions (I don't know that all are strictly forks, since I think the proprietary bits of at least some are using the extension mechanism.)
> Why? There's plenty of permissive F/OSS projects with large numbers of contributors.
Companies invest in developing Linux to create a commodity they can leverage to sell their products and services. The GPL ensures the investment remains a commodity and cannot be used in proprietary products that can't be also leveraged by the initial contributor.
There was a lot of BSD in the core of every proprietary Unix, each tied to a given manufacturer.
> There was a lot of BSD in the core of every proprietary Unix, each tied to a given manufacturer
Except MacOS X, the major proprietary Unixes all predated permissively-licensed releases of BSD, and the early permissively licensed releases were under a copyright cloud for years that prevented anyone from relying on them for commercial downstream distributions.
If you read further down the Twitter thread you’ll see others point out that AWS actually DID acknowledge him in the release and thus his original rant isn’t accurate. He acknowledges that later in the thread. Of course the, now inaccurate, headline Tweet remains the thing getting attention.
>If you read further down the Twitter thread you’ll see others point out that AWS actually did acknowledge him in the release and thus his original rant isn’t accurate. He acknowledges that later in the thread.
Thanks for informing us with the clarification. The original tweet was 11:16 UTC. This HN thread was submitted 11:23 UTC.
That twitter reply showing the acknowledgement in "NOTICES.txt" was later at 11:54 UTC.
I'm not sure the timeline is important, other than to say HN posters shouldn't submit incendiary tweets as HN topics without some sort of corroboration. Especially when the person who tweets and posts on HN are the same.
Here's the timeline I saw:
11:16 - A person blames AWS of something without additional context and understanding
11:23 - Presumably the same person posts on HN (to signal boost? farm karma from the anti-Amazon crowd sure to pop up? both?)
Never:Never - OP apologizes for rousing the HN pitchfork mob
They did the legal bare minimum in terms of attribution, but you're very unlikely to find it unless you're looking for it.
I don't usually read through files like ~/.config/chromium/Default/Extensions/bhdnlmmgiplmbcdmkkdfplenecpegfno/0.0.1_0/NOTICE.txt (though perhaps I should).
Interesting cultural differences. In other places if you submit earlier than the deadline they assume you didn't care about it enough to use all available time to make it as good as possible.
In a somewhat similar scenario, we had some discussions about what "Friday midnight" means. So just to be super clear, we finally put "Thursday, 11pm".
As a range or interval specifier, many (most?) non-programmers will assume the interpretation of “midnight” that favours them in any subsequent dispute.
In practice this often means that “from midnight on Monday to midnight on Tuesday” is a 48-hour interval so far as consumers are concerned. I recommend advertising things like cut-off times as “11:59pm” and friends, when possible.
Also, my time formatter turns “12:00” into “12 noon” following weary experience of people who confuse 12:00 with midnight.
Funny, these kind of threads sound similarly to how some companies I have worked for sound when talking about working on Saturdays:
Me: Do we have to come to work on Saturdays?
Boss: You dont HAVE to... but you know, people come and do work to go the extra mile.
Me: Ok, but If I don't come, there's no problem right?
Boss: Well, no, there's no problem. But you know, there's lots of work and it is great when people push together.
Me: Ok good, yeah I like my work and I like helping others but, I also appreciate my personal life. So... no problem if I decide not coming on Saturday right?
Boss: MMhhgh yeah, no problem, but you know, we like to think you are COMMITED to our startup mission.
And, then they get angry when I don't go on Saturdays. If you want me to go on Saturdays just put it in the darn contract and tell that as part of the terms when we are negotiating, then I'll walk out and we will all be happy.
Same here, if the developer wanted something to happen, then he should have put it in the license. Otherwise, there's no reason to be whining that something that was NOT expected to happen (as per the license) did not happen.
Sure, but this is a situation about social norms rather than passive aggressive employer behavior.
Typically when a product or service is released, if it's built significantly upon something else, you at least throw out a quick acknowledgement. Sure, it's not the law, it's just polite/kind/whatever nice word you prefer to use.
All sorts of communities have various 'norms' of this nature which you are totally entitled to ignore but that doesn't mean they're not there.
> Sure, but this is a situation about social norms rather than passive aggressive employer behavior.
Every time I come across a thread - on any forum - where people are educating others that something is a social norm, it is because it is not. They merely want it to be.
If you have a good number of people disagreeing on it, take it as a humble suggestion that norms differ across geos, industries, culture, etc. Don't insist on it, because it will come across as an imposition.
Unrelated to the content in my comment above, I look at this from the same lens I look at products in my engineering world. We don't find a need to credit Claude Shannon, John Von Neumann, Tony Hoare, etc in all our products. I find this to be OK.
> Every time I come across a thread - on any forum - where people are educating others that something is a social norm, it is because it is not. They merely want it to be.
Saying "thank you" and giving credit to someone who did you a solid is pretty universally a norm.
> If you have a good number of people disagreeing on it, take it as a humble suggestion that norms differ across geos, industries, culture, etc.
Or, there's just the fraction of people who disregard and push back on norms.
> We don't find a need to credit Claude Shannon, John Von Neumann, Tony Hoare, etc in all our products. I find this to be OK.
It's a bit different here, in that the people you cite are titans who developed ideas that might be a portion of a work... which is a bit different from using the work wholesale. I don't think anyone would expect Amazon to thank/cite/acknowledge something they used that comprised 1% of a product... but when it reaches a very high proportion it's time to mention it.
Further, these were academics. We do have a norm of citing them when we're deeply using and building upon their work academically.
> Saying "thank you" and giving credit to someone who did you a solid is pretty universally a norm.
How much time have you spent looking for counterexamples in the society where you live? Where people do something for the common good and most consumers do not say "Thank you". Have you done this exercise?
> Or, there's just the fraction of people who disregard and push back on norms
This is a convenient, self-fulfilling narrative. It is also pitting you into an adversarial position with someone. It's highly risky to insist on a norm and accuse others of not honoring it - and then be viewed as someone who is inflexible. It's your choice, though.
> How much time have you spent looking for counterexamples in the society where you live?
I've spent a whole lot of time thinking about norms and observing their observance, enforcement, and what kinds of circumstances they tend to be disregarded. I've read a lot of the lit, too, thank you.
> This is a convenient, self-fulfilling narrative.
So is refusing to acknowledge the existence of norms because some people refuse to acknowledge them. Ultimately, our social reality is something we pretend into existence together.
> It is also pitting you into an adversarial position with someone. It's highly risky to insist on a norm and accuse others of not honoring it - and then be viewed as someone who is inflexible. It's your choice, though.
Whinging that someone broke norm A [e.g. seemed ungrateful] and thinking less of people/entities that you've heard have done the same is pretty cheap and isn't likely to earn you value judgments yourself.
> I've spent a whole lot of time thinking about norms and observing their observance, enforcement, and what kinds of circumstances they tend to be disregarded. I've read a lot of the lit, too, thank you.
Then I hope you've noticed that there are instances in society where "Saying thank you and giving credit to someone who did you a solid" is not the norm.
> So is refusing to acknowledge the existence of norms because some people refuse to acknowledge them.
We are in agreement here.
> Whinging that someone broke norm A [e.g. seemed ungrateful] and thinking less of people/entities that you've heard have done the same is pretty cheap and isn't likely to earn you value judgments yourself.
I have no idea what you're trying to say here. This sounds precisely what people are doing: Whining that Amazon seemed ungrateful and thinking less of people who do likewise. Which is orthogonal to what I'm saying.
> > > It's highly risky to insist on a norm and accuse others of not honoring it
> This sounds precisely what people are doing: Whining that Amazon seemed ungrateful and thinking less of people who do likewise.
Yup, and while there's variation in the hivemind, all in all I don't think a very large fraction of it is snapping back and thinking of the author as inflexible. So p'raps it's not so highly risky.
> Crediting the work of a project you directly forked to create your own is a social norm in the open source world.
This is merely repeating the same statement over and over ("Yes it is" "No it isn't" "Yes it is" "No it isn't" ad nauseum). It's not furthering the conversation.
That Amazon decided to do it has no bearing on whether it is a norm or not.
I worked for a financial organisation in Dublin for a while back in the 90's. Best attitude to this stuff I have experienced:
You have 8 hours to do your work in. If you need more than that then you're either slacking off or incompetent. If you've been given more than 8 hours work to do then that's a scheduling problem you need to take up with your manager.
Everyone worked their arses off all day, and at 5pm the entire office went to the pub to socialise. Some only stayed for a short time then went home. Others stayed on for hours. But staying in the office after 5pm was not acceptable.
As a developer, it was great. Interruptions were always pertinent, because all the socialising happened in the pub. I could code in peace for ~8 hours, which tbh is about my limit anyway, after that my quality goes downhill fast. And then we all hung out together. Being a developer who can't do the social thing in work hours with losing massive time to context switching wasn't a social handicap, for once.
So you're saying the only courtesies we should render to others in life are ones that we're duty-bound by license agreements or other contracts to give?
Out with social norms and niceties, and in with black letter law?
I don't want to legally demand a specific acknowledgement; I know that this can have unintended consequences and greatly complicates adoption.
Also: If my stuff is used at the periphery of something you're doing, I don't really care. On the other hand, if you get to market by largely just repackaging what I've made, it seems that by social norms I'm due a hat tip, whether or not it's legally demanded.
> So you're saying the only courtesies we should render to others in life are ones that we're duty-bound by license agreements or other contracts to give?
Nothing you do for your employer as part of work should be considered "courtesy" or a "social nicety".
The "something you do for your employer as part of work" was a strawman and doesn't relate to what we're talking about. We're talking about whether it meets social norms to take open source work, launch it as the core piece of a product, and do the absolute minimum legally required acknowledgment.
I think they’re bemoaning the fact that many employers will couch it in terms of courtesy yet also claim the right to be angry if you don’t go above what is required. It should be encouraged to do more than required, yes. But it shouldn’t be punishable if you don’t.
The employer thing is a strawman here; the subject of the article is AWS forking and launching a product with minimal (but legal) attribution. I didn't argue -anything- about the employer case, staying on topic to AWS's behavior.
> So you're saying the only courtesies we should render to others in life are ones that we're duty-bound by license agreements or other contracts to give?
Isn't that the whole point behind the rule of law and the civil society?
Anything that isn't well understood or known in advance of someone engaging in an activity, and then later faces unfair retribution because apparently they didn't do what wasn't told to them that needed be done, or did something that wasn't told to them shouldn't be done.
All these "social norm" sounds like guilt trip and power grabs to me. You did something you said was free and that you were giving it to me no string attached, then you come back and guilt trip me saying that there were in fact strings attached and that you expected things in return.
Now, yes I understand that maybe when you said hey this is open source with Apache license, you had in mind an audience of students, or one man startups, or hobbyist, or amateurs, and hadn't really thought if it applied to big corps. And I actually wonder how the courts normally handle this, when someone who put the conditions forward first was in a position where they couldn't have anticipated the event and thus couldn't have pre-conditioned it. I'm not too sure how to handle it myself, but here I'm guessing is a lesson to learn for others, choose your license carefully, think about the various possibility.
> Anything that isn't well understood or known in advance of someone engaging in an activity, and then later faces unfair retribution because apparently they didn't do what wasn't told to them that needed be done, or did something that wasn't told to them shouldn't be done.
Your argument self-contradicts. You assert, broadly, if it's legal it's OK. The "unfair retribution" of people getting annoyed about it and complaining is also legal, so that should be OK, too. :P
> Now, yes I understand that maybe when you said hey this is open source with Apache license, you had in mind an audience of students, or one man startups, or hobbyist, or amateurs, and hadn't really thought if it applied to big corps.
Nah, when I said "Apache License", I meant that legal license. But that doesn't mean doing some things that effectively cost nothing, that exceed the license requirements, aren't socially customary.
There's no law that says you have to say "thank you" when someone renders you a service or has made something that makes your life easier or lets you make a bunch of money, but if you stand on legal grounds to avoid saying "thanks" you might be a dick, and people might call you out for being a dick.
Well, there are rules around defamation, libel and slander. But you're right, there's no laws saying one cannot guilt trip someone else or shame them for their behavior even if they are acting legally.
I think this is me criticizing those same "social norms". In my opinion, it is unfair to guilt trip someone or have hidden expectations when someone does a good deed for you. Especially when you decided to do the deed on your own and you went and promoted it for others to benefit and use.
Obviously it's nice when you do something and others thank you and acknowledge you for it. But it isn't nice when someone complains they're not getting a thank you for something they choose to do willingly and weren't asked to do.
Now I reckon here it's a bit different, because we're talking about two actors of very uneven footing, and I would like to see Amazon being more thankful and recognising the hard work of open source contributors. I agree with that sentiment. I just wanted to say that in general, yes those social norms are often against what I'd consider a free society, since they are just another axis of power to force you into behaviors you might not have agreed to participate in.
> But it isn't nice when someone complains they're not getting a thank you for something they choose to do willingly and weren't asked to do.
If you benefit from something someone else does, you owe them a debt of gratitude. It's not a legal debt, and it's not denominated in dollars and cents... but you shouldn't be surprised that there are norms of repaying this debt in various ways and that people/entities that excessively "take" from the commons incur reputational damage.
> I just wanted to say that in general, yes those social norms are often against what I'd consider a free society, since they are just another axis of power to force you into behaviors you might not have agreed to participate in.
This just feels like hyperbole to me. Expecting acknowledgment from someone when they've benefitted from something you've done is not an unreasonable ask. Getting shamed when you don't do this isn't a significant curtailment of liberty.
> If you benefit from something someone else does, you owe them a debt of gratitude. It's not a legal debt, and it's not denominated in dollars and cents... but you shouldn't be surprised that there are norms of repaying this debt in various ways
Yes and this is what I'm criticizing. If I am in dept, then say so and make it explicit to me before I take the dept unknowingly, otherwise I'm sorry, but I will in turn shame you for being a cry baby and I won't abide by these norms, because I disagree with them.
To me, social norm is just another form of force to impose ones will on others. And thus an attack on liberty. And the idea of a social contract is that I consent to give away some liberties for being able to participate in a functioning society. But when the social contract isn't explicit, and expectations arn't stated, I find that unfair, no matter if the force is physical or psychological. The act of coming back after the deed, and saying that accepting the deed bound me to X,Y,Z where none of those was stipulated, ya I find that crooked. At this point anything can be stipulated. For example, what is Amazon supposed to do here? Should they offer a job? Pay up some amount of money? Cancel their project? Put a banner on amazon.com thanking the contributor? How long should the banner stay up? Etc. They're just at the mercy of the wims of others, and they might start to regret having taken this "dept" which they didn't know came with all these strings attached. And by the way, it's not just that they didn't know, on fact, the author had written down in details as part of the attached license what all the expectations were, but now claims that more was implicitly expected based on some loosely defined social norms. Had the work been unlicensed, Amazon would not have used it.
P.S.: But again, just to be clear, I'm talking about the principles at play here, in this particular scenario, I acknowledge this isn't like a massive issue and a crazy demand or attack on Amazon's liberty. And I'd be really amazed and impressed and would think highly of Amazon if they went above and beyond the license here.
> To me, social norm is just another form of force to impose ones will on others. And thus an attack on liberty. And the idea of a social contract is that I consent to give away some liberties for being able to participate in a functioning society. But when the social contract isn't explicit, and expectations arn't stated, I find that unfair, no matter if the force is physical or psychological.
Welp, good luck with that. There's tens of thousands of social rules that are understood by 99% of people, and you're not going to find an explicit list somewhere of how far to stand away from someone when talking to them, to what kinds of initial conversations are appropriate, to saying "thank you" after someone gives you something, to attributing an idea to someone else, etc. And failing to follow them will rapidly earn you scorn.
> For example, what is Amazon supposed to do here? Should they offer a job? Pay up some amount of money? Cancel their project? Put a banner on amazon.com thanking the contributor?
If the product is 98% built upon some open source stuff, you put in the 2nd or 3rd paragraph description that it's "built upon" or "powered by" or "makes use of." Even a footnote might be OK. This is pretty obviously the right thing to do, and it's also helpful to your users in understanding what your product is.
I’m not sure what the complaint is actually. It seems like the author just wants recognition. I’m not sure why he would want to expect anything other than what he specified in his project.
I pointed out that the minimum is to be expected because I’ve seen it mentioned a few times that’s all they did. Like the expectation is that they should have done more.
It’s a company forking a project, I would expect nothing else. It would be notable if he got a T-shirt or something.
Are people really expecting the devs at AWS to give a "thank you" to every third party developer out there who's code they use? This is just ridiculous. When does this become an obligation? Is there an unwritten rule of how large/successful a team has to be before they need to give thank's like this?
I think thatguyagain is making a good point about infinite regress. Should we all add a thank you to our github pages, thanking every dependency, library, framework, to Stroustrup, to Stallman, to Linus, and to John von Neumann?
I’m with you on that one, but if you are literally just forking a package, rather than depending on a package, and rebranding it into your ecosystem, then a big “thank you for making this and making it open source” is appropriate.
I do tend to mention the major projects I build on in my credits, as well as actually respecting attribution licenses when I make my little forks. The effort is minimal, it's all good karma. If everyone did this, we'd probably have fewer "openssl" or "pgp" situations, as the people doing the work would get actual visibility through the chain.
>Should we all add a thank you to our github pages, thanking every dependency, library, framework, to Stroustrup, to Stallman, to Linus, and to John von Neumann?
Did you copy their inventions 1:1 and rebranded them as your own? No you didn't. You just used them which is different.
If your understanding of somebody leads you to obvious absurdity, one possibility is they're being absurd. The other is that you misunderstood them. I think it's worth exploring both paths before posting to suggest somebody's a fool.
As does this - that's what the NOTICES file is for. When I've looked at it on TVs it looks the same: Copyright notice and license terms that they're required to bundle with any redistribution.
I don't think you need to give a "thank you" in the announcement to every library you use, but if you have a product that's just a fork of an open source project, then, yes, I definitely think you should thank them in the announcement.
If someone gave you tens of thousands of dollars of valuables would you say thank you? If people gave that to you regularly would you become too bothered to say thank you? especially when your acknowledgement could help the person giving you their wealth?
In communication circles, people differentiate between requests and demands. The key differentiator: Turning down a request does not lead to anything negative. In particular, the requestor is not displeased or upset. If he/she is, then it was likely a demand disguised as a request.
On the other hand, fulfilling a request can, and often will, lead to a positive. It's still a request.
If you're going to be upset about it, don't phrase it as a request. A big chunk of the population will be annoyed by it.
Soapbox aside, getting to your comment: If someone is giving me that money unsolicited, I may or may not give a thank you. Context is extremely relevant. I did not give a "Thank you" to the recent stimulus check, for example. And I've definitely had fights with people voluntarily giving me stuff over and over and complaining about my not saying "thank you" (or even worse, not reciprocating). I've had to forbid them from giving me gifts in the future. I'm not saying my attitude is the norm, but it is "one of the norms".
The book Influence covers this topic in a lot of detail, and this is commonly discussed in Negotiations books. The bottom line: Be wary of gifts, and either reject if you suspect reciprocation is desired (which could mean "Thank you"), or make the understanding explicit and keep the reciprocity in mind. Of course, this goes at odds with several cultures.
As much as we like to talk about "open source" culture, it doesn't exist. It gets argued to death every time it comes up, which is a good sign it doesn't exist. A big chunk of the SW world, if not the majority, do not feel a need to reciprocate - even with a thank you. (Most of that chunk are OK giving a "Thank you", and this is not a contradiction).
not sure why you've been down-voted but I thought that was well explained. I do rather strongly disagree with your example as being relevant, but I think you've made a lot of good, relevant points. Your example of stimulus being a gift is incorrect. We explicitly pay into social programs as a society with full expectation that those funds will be used to help us. Stimulus isn't a gift.
Well since they save a tremendous amount of time and effort by incorporating code that other developers spend their time on it the least they could do. Heck, it's even possible to mostly automate this as a lot of companies already (automatically) check for licences that require attribution or have other conflicts before you release your product.
Actually yes, we do. And I don't think this is excessively onerous. While not a legal requirement, it is a legitimate expectation, like having your "Good Morning" returned by someone, and we feel sad when this does not happen.
No, but they do it typically: "Announcing AWS X, our implementation of {open source project}" (they do this with MongoDB, ActiveMQ, etc). The product mentioned here is more than just a managed version of the open source project; it is a major component however. (good example is Redshift, though when they announced it they barely mentioned the role Postgresql plays in that to be honest)
The code may not be based on their code, but I don't see how you can have an emulation of X that isn't based on X. Imitation may be the sincerest form of flattery, but there's nothing stopping them from including some of the other forms. Plus a little gratitude, maybe.
Every talk AWS does about Redshift they mention that it’s based on Postgres. They tell you to download a Postgres driver to connect to it with any language besides Java for which a JDBC driver is provided.
Well ... they tell you that not because they're bending over backwards to give postgres credit. They're doing it to tell you that the barrier of entry to this database is nearly 0 if you are already using Postgres.
But if you try to use the same schema design from a standard Postgres database and use the same query patterns, you will be sorely disappointed. Redshift uses a columnar store and is an OLAP database as opposed to Postgres which is a traditional database.
No I totally get that. It is designed for data warehousing workloads rather than transactional. I'm saying that I have seen it more as a feature of "you use your existing tools and drivers" since it speaks the postgres wire protocol.
I agree, but I was trying to be apples to apples and compare launch announcements, and when Redshift was announced, the discussion of Postgres was quite muted (admittedly several years ago, so their messaging may have shifted over time)
...yes? This is an automatable process these days, AWS / Amazon certainly have the resources to do it, and under many OSS licences it's a legal obligation to give attribution.
I would hardly call that a rant. And I would hardly call a deeply buried source reference the kind of collegial social acknowledgement he was hoping for. So perhaps, as somebody very concerned about inaccuracy, you could correct your errors here?
Business offering a software service and open-source developer are not colleagues. One is selling a service, the other is writing code, there is simply no comparison.
Ah, yes, he is acknowledged in a text file that almost no one will read.
Obviously there is no legal requirement, but would it be that hard for Amazon to include a "forked from..." or "built off of...", etc. to the announcement and product pages, if it really is heavily based off of another work?
There's probably oodles. Off the top of my head, there's Apple's web page for X11. Except for a spinal tap joke, the whole first section of the page was devoted to the acknowledgement that they were building on top of OSS from XFree86.
Hell, can you show an example from the author's own company? That company's about page has a blurb on contributing back to open source that seems to be on par with what Amazon does to contribute to open source, and the author is sponsoring 4 people on GitHub, but where are the loud proclamations that people are clamoring for in this thread? Whose shoulders are being stood on there? Is checklyhq.com really running a SaaS offering without benefiting from many, many more people than the outward stance suggests?
This whole thing is very reminiscent of the Occupy Wall Street movement. People are very sensitive to the injustices they perceive themselves as having to endure especially in relation to those wealthier than them. But where's the willingness to jump out of local scope and apply the same principle globally (and reflexively)? It seems to be absent.
Blink? Not an exact parallel, but afaik, google clearly gave credit to webkit. And I think Apple gave credit to KHTML for Webkit (and in fact worked with the khtml team for a while).
But even if FAANG don't typically give credit to projects they fork, that doesn't mean it is ok. That's like saying all the big political parties gerrymander, so gerrymandering is ok.
I believe CC-BY[0] covers this. Worth noting that CC is more of a generalist license than software, though, so you may not have as fine-grained control as with BSD/GPL/MIT etc.
Good catch. I think you could get somewhat around this by running a CC-BY-SA, which requires that Amazon disclose the source of their forked product, which in turn would include a credit.
That is super interesting, I was actually thinking about it as I was writing that response. Isn't that non-enforceable? As in, if you write a legal document, and then make that document law, and then copyright it, it would mean that you wouldn't be able to modify the law without breaching copyright law. Is this really true and enforceable?
Ah, cool. It sounds like they have a specific way they want you to avoid modifying the text at the end of the paragraph about modifying it (for version 3):
> Rather than modifying the GPL, please use the exception mechanism offered by GPL version 3.
Rolling your own license isn't trivial. You could end up with something that nobody wants to touch because the legal implications are unclear, or something that's unenforceable, or both.
> In other words, I'm not aware of a permissive license that's the same as BSD/Apache with the only difference in that also says "use it as you wish but you must mention my name when you're a commercial enterprise making a splashy product announcement".
There is: the four-clause (original) BSD license (https://choosealicense.com/licenses/bsd-4-clause/).
Pretty much no one uses it anymore because things quickly get unwieldy if you have to mention ten or twenty projects you used code from in all advertising.
Isn't there a requirement to acknowledge the original author for all copyrighted work, no matter how permissive the license is? That is, the only way to not make it a requirement is to put the work in the public domain, and in some countries, it is not even an option.
That is, how can you know who the copyright holder is if you don't do that?
Considering that not all projects are littered with (c) Stack Overflow User, I may have the wrong idea, but it is definitely something I have seen somewhere. I am not a lawyer, obviously.
I find this entire thread absurd though...if the person wanted to get fair credit, they should have used a different license. It's like saying "Hey, totally ok to have a beer from my fridge. But I'd reallyreally plead you to drop in a buck... but only if you wish though. But I highly recommend it. It would be shame if you don't. Most people don't want to be shamed do they?"
Just be straight forward and put that in the license. Otherwise, it is truly optional and should be treated as such.
As much as I dislike having trillion dollar corporation not give a credit, that's why we have licenses.
- I don't want to use restrictive (GPL) license like those business-hating FSF folks–I want people to use my software _freely_
- Hey! A big business used my software in a way that rubs me the wrong way (in this case, without giving prominent enough attribution)! Not nice!
What's not nice about it? You use a permissive license but you're going to get upset if people follow the letter of your license? This doesn't make sense. This might make sense if there were not alternative licenses but there are, and the author chose not to use them. This seems like playing a mind-game. "It's permissive! Use it how you like! (but I'm going to be upset if you don't follow the unwritten attribution guideline I have in my head)." How is it fair to expect other parties to meet your secret expectations?
What did AWS do wrong here? Were they supposed to know this guy's unwritten expectations?
> How is it fair to expect other parties to meet your secret expectations?
> What did AWS do wrong here? Were they supposed to know this guy's unwritten expectations?
I suspect you're either autistic or a lawyer being obstinate. Human society is full of unwritten expectations, we learn these quickly as a child or face social consequences. No where in the law is it written that you must say 'please' and 'thank you' but it's also expected and people are less likely to do things for you again if you don't.
So consider this situation now:
_A person (the dev) did something nice for someone else (a trillion dollar company) and they didn't bother to say thank you._
The answer you're looking for this guy wrote up 10+ years ago: If you don't like the way people are using your work, release your next work under a different license that more closely matches what you want. Learn from the mistake & don't make it again.
Maybe I'm autistic (the diagnostic criteria are very fuzzy around the edges) but I'm not sure what that has to do with my argument.
AWS did wrong by being so wealthy. They could have done better easily.
It is like fair use: They guy that uses google drive to backup youtube in its entirety is not doing anything illegal. He just demonstrates that he cannot deal with freedom.
There is, and will always be, a gap between what is strictly allowed/legal, and what is considered ethical/courteous.
There's a number of things that are strictly speaking legal, but still considered rude. Often, the reputation of a person or business is based at least in part on whether they do the legal bare minimum, or if they hold themselves to some level of higher standard.
I also think there's a difference between attribution because a license requires it (commonly buried several links/pages deep in some obscure "Here's a laundry list of ALL the open source packages we used to build this"), and acknowledging that a _specific_ library powers the core of a new product. I don't know of any license that marks that line.
Fair enough. I just don't know if it makes sense to expect tech companies operate with any values besides making money. That's why I say "don't ask or beg them to be courteous, force them to either be courteous or 'don't use my code', which a license can do."
Frog & scorpion don'cha know.
The other thing that annoys is the fact that the permissiveness of the license is precisely why AWS used it, probably part of why it's popular, why he can tweet about it & build his brand etc. The author has and continues to benefit from the permissiveness of the license. To enjoy the upside of permissive but complain that the downside isn't fair comes off as a bit self-serving.
I mean this point exactly (though I come at from the other side). If one wishes a big business to respect their commons then bite the bullet and use the "restrictive" (they are in fact freedom guaranteeing) commons protecting licenses (like AGPL) be radical. If one takes issue with the business practices of big business don't gently shove back with social expectations and a sound bite here and there, draw the hard line in the sand.
I disagree, he posted a rant on twitter complaining about amazons behaviour. Even if he admits that its not technically required, he is still generatig negative press for someone legitamently exercising their rights under the open source license he used.
In my opinion he is violating the spirit of the open source license since he is using extra-legal means to interefere with amazon exercising their rights under the apache license. This is unethical in my opinion
> In other words, I'm not aware of a permissive license that's the same as BSD/Apache with the only difference in that also says "use it as you wish but you must mention my name when you're a commercial enterprise making a splashy product announcement".
That's called the old BSD 4 clause license. Now you know.
Could everyone take a moment here and reflect on their hostile attitude towards an open source author who just wants to be treated fairly (in a moral sense)?
My guess is that none of the people who are lecturing and gloating have ever written anything substantial. Shame on you.
The issue here is HN loves Amazon. That's why you are seeing the hostility. If it was Google doing that, I can guarantee you the HN response would be radically different.
He used a permissive license so that everyone, including Amazon, can use his code without any strings attached. Presumably because he wants his software to spread far and wide. This is the typically stated reason why people use permissive licenses, isn't it?
Therefore, shouldn't he be thanking Amazon for spreading his software?
Just pointing out the hypocrisy of embracing "openness" and "free software" that anyone could use freely, then getting mad when someone does use it.
Also it's funny to see the FOSS crowd rediscover the need for intellectual property, having denounced it when it was applied in the opposite direction.
By law you need to pay for accepted work at least the minimum wage. My question is whether AWS is breaking the law by appropriating someone else work without payment? Or do you think something like this should be regulated?
I see this as a loophole, where companies can gain useful projects without having to pay wages.
Here's another example of AWS interactions with OSS: instead of contributing a perfectly good and non-AWS dependant feature to an upstream project (PGBouncer, for a strictly PostgreSQL-level useful feature) they decided to rather stretch it and publish their changes as a _patch_ to the upstream project instead, with a different, restrictive license that only allows its usage on AWS services, together with examples on how to use it on RDS/Redshift:
It's worth mentioning that this isn't just a case of people not being able to use the patch outside of AWS; the patch is actually impeding pgbouncer from implementing a similar feature:
> We'd like to rewrite such features for pgbouncer from the ground up but it is impossible to prove to the lawyer that the re-writing is not kind of "derivative works". I believe it is not what you expected, as an opensource project that derived benefit from the whole pgbouncer community.
“3.3 Use Limitation. The Work and any derivative works thereof only may be used or intended for use with the web services, computing platforms or applications provided by Amazon.com, Inc. or its affiliates, including Amazon Web Services, Inc.” from https://github.com/awslabs/pgbouncer-rr-patch/blob/master/LI...
Is this a one off activity, or does Amazon do this regularly as part of their moat?
Yeah buts not visible to the enduser or be rewarded in any way. You have to download the CRX (Chrome extension) file yourself, extract it and then you could see the content of the NOTICES.txt...
I'm extremely disappointed to see how many comments on here focus on the very narrow legal questions and amount to: "Your license didn't say they couldn't."
Open source software is more than a license and code. It is a community and the digital public square.
And the Tragedy of the Commons is just as applicable to our public square as it is to William Forster Lloyd's common land.
Either we as a community hold ourselves and others within our community to a higher standard than the text of a license, or licenses will inevitably become increasingly restrictive in the future, to the detriment of all.
Honestly, this point is kind of nonsense to me. If people acted as if they were held to the higher standard, we would not need licenses. People (especially when they're not acting alone, e.g. corporations) act in their monetary interest, most of the time. Hence, stick to the license that's least restrictive that still ticks all the boxes you feel are important. If you feel attribution is important, choose a license that makes it legally binding.
If I suggest an idea from a coworker in a meeting as if it was mine, that move would be seen, at the very least, as somewhat rude. If I got that idea from examining the competition, that would be seen as a smart move.
Sure, if attribution is a requirement then the natural thing to do is to turn it into a legal requirement. But I don't think that is the discussion here.
It comes down to how we want to treat open source. In order to encourage open source, I believe giving credit, even if not required, is courteous. Corporations are not monolithic entities that are perfectly defined. People work on these corporations.
> If I suggest an idea from a coworker in a meeting as if it was mine, that move would be seen, at the very least, as somewhat rude.
It will be lot more rude if your coworker now hit social media berating you for stealing other people's ideas. If just office ideas were this important may be they need to be submitted with process of academic journals with proper attribution.
It can't be both ways: "Announcing that take my idea / software and run with it" And if someone does, telling them "you are first rate moocher, aren't ya?"
> stealing other people’s ideas without acknowledgement’
Huh, I never heard of 'stealing with acknowledgement'. That'd be plain usage.
> I’d be inclined to agree with the coworker.
I'd think that co-worker would be subject of constant derision where people would run every trivial thing by them asking if they had thought it originally.
Edit: To be clear I support directly confronting folks taking ideas often without attribution or taking to higher ups if that is so important. But social shaming means the person better be prepared to live up to much higher public standards than it would be for some interpersonal issue.
Corporations the size of Amazon are imune to shame. If it's not a hard requirement, they'll only comply if it's not against their self interest to do so.
> that move would be seen, at the very least, as somewhat rude.
In a few places I worked at, this was just par for the course. It's all in the (corporate) game.
As much as decent, polite, and courteous people do exist (and I try to be one of them), it's a fact of life that assholes exist, and they often prosper on the back of such decent people.
I agree this is about the culture of software and open source in particular.
Reducing the issue to the bare minimal legal requirement is stooping low, that we cannot expect corporations to behave ethically, with common decency and respect, unless forced to do so by law. Sure, that's the real world, but we should demand better of the people who run and work in these corporations.
Every contract, every law states what we see as the bare minimum required not to be actively harmful. They're society's skeleton. But bodies are more than bone, and societies are more than people doing the bare legal minimum.
Look at what the law requires of parents, for example. Food, shelter, clothing, school attendance, a lack of physical abuse. But parents who do the legal minimum and no more are awful parents, and awful people. But more laws wouldn't help. What kind of law could guarantee love? What kind of police could enforce it?
Community spirit is not something that can be expressed in a contract. Acting like people should have foreseen a particular asshole and tried to defend against them contractually is victim-blaming. The actual solution is for assholes to hear from the community that the behavior isn't welcome.
It's not perfect, but it works very well. None of my contributions to open source projects happened because they were required by license. On my own projects I've had people give generously of their time and expertise out of community spirit. Are some people jerks anyhow? Sure. But a different license wouldn't have changed that.
That seems like a very hard line to me. Copyright gives fairly comprehensive control over use, however trying to draw a line somewhere down full-control, attribution or no control seems very hard.
As it is today you can use your full control to allow full use with attribution. Of course the "unfairness" probably comes from the fact that you can't force others to do the same.
In my opinion the best option is to keep copyright at "full control" with a time limit. Probably 10-20 years. However that doesn't solve your desire for only attribution.
> Open source software is more than a license and code. It is a community and the digital public square.
Unfortunately, there's absolutely nothing about the OSS community that actually instills this mantra in people. I like to think that I also see OSS as a community and digital public square, but there's no universality to that philosophy.
> Either we as a community hold ourselves and others within our community to a higher standard than the text of a license, or licenses will inevitably become increasingly restrictive in the future, to the detriment of all.
There's just no way that the community will ever do this because there are inherently conflicting incentives to participating in OSS. If you tried to explicitly motivate people to do this, you'd immediately get pushback from the individualistic elements of the community that don't want to participate in something that they feel is politically motivated or that Amazon did nothing wrong.
OSS is a great thing that has tremendously benefited the industry, but the idealism of a community acting together without any consequences or incentives to do so is truly folly. As much as I wish OSS had more of a true community feel to it (and I think there are little pockets where this is tangibly felt), OSS largely exists to provide tools for commercial software development. Those people are out to build businesses and accrue wealth, not fortify the OSS community. I'm sure there are people that actually work to accomplish both, but the vast majority of founders and companies I've worked for in my career don't see OSS as a community. They see it as a giant puzzle box where each piece is an OSS project and their goal is connect pieces together in order to sell a product to somebody. Get acquired/IPO and you've solved the puzzle.
> OSS is a great thing that has tremendously benefited the industry
I'm beginning to question this. The proliferation and commoditization of F/OSS is what made SaaS business thrive, and made it so that integration and polish is the only avenue left to make a buck, leading to our paltry attention economy, oligopoly, and platform lock-in by network effects. This after decades of personal computing striving to liberate users from mainframes. F/OSS is also drying out - when was the last time you used a piece of software that truly achieved something useful on its own rather than solving a perceived problem that only exists because of the idiosyncratic nature of the web and cloud stacks? Meanwhile, maintainers of popular F/OSS get nothing in return.
"when was the last time you used a piece of software that truly achieved something useful on its own rather than solving a perceived problem that only exists because of the idiosyncratic nature of the web and cloud stacks?"
Go and Rust. Probably unpopular opinions, but I'm very glad those two languages are open source.
I'd bet that this outlook is the sort of narrow-sighted, can't-even-understand-the-question sort of thinking that the person you're responding to had in mind when asking the question—as what not to focus on when talking about the successes of FOSS. That even with the point made in a very straightforward way it gets responses like this is a huge signal of what sort of problem we're dealing with.
Go and Rust amount to infrastructure, not software that "truly achieve[s] something useful on its own".
> The proliferation and commoditization of F/OSS is what made SaaS business thrive, and made it so that integration and polish is the only avenue left to make a buck, leading to our paltry attention economy, oligopoly, and platform lock-in by network effects.
Do I think F/OSS played a role in these issues? Absolutely. Do I think it's the primary role in causing these issues? Definitely not. I'd argue that weak antitrust law, ill-intentioned VC money, and lack of oversight of software titans play the biggest role in what you've described here. Yes, F/OSS gave the companies tools to iterate over app development quickly, but they were pushed for hockey stick growth and total market domination by the checkbooks, and the government has completely failed to police their behavior. F/OSS gave people with questionable incentives the ability to do questionable things, but it didn't create the motivation to do those questionable things.
> when was the last time you used a piece of software that truly achieved something useful on its own rather than solving a perceived problem that only exists because of the idiosyncratic nature of the web and cloud stacks?
I actually use a fair amount of F/OSS that is independently useful to me, projects like Hammerspoon, MIDIMonitor, VLC, MuseScore, and others. Yes, the majority of F/OSS that I use is for commercial purposes, but that's certainly not exclusive.
> Meanwhile, maintainers of popular F/OSS get nothing in return.
I completely agree with this, and I think it's one of the most critical problems to the F/OSS movement.
> when was the last time you used a piece of software that truly achieved something useful on its own rather than solving a perceived problem that only exists because of the idiosyncratic nature of the web and cloud stacks?
All the time. One I use every day? Emacs. (Which long predates anything web or cloud related.) For a more recently developed example? Guix.
Setting aside the fact that a very large portion of the software I use outside work is free software.
> The proliferation and commoditization of F/OSS is what made SaaS business thrive[...] after decades of personal computing striving to liberate users from mainframes.
That's because of developers' (read: devops folk) own narrow focus of open source. When someone talks about open source having won, they're referring to how their company has three dozen services published on GitHub that can somehow be strung together to approximate 60% of what their company is actually putting in people's hands at the end of the day. That's open source for you.
Stallman and his acolytes had it right all along about focusing on free software as a philosophy meant to empower users and not career programmers (who already generally make more than the average household...). It doesn't matter if a smattering of SaaSsy services are open source if (a) it's mired in the sort of headaches that are par for the course in devops today with respect to actually being able to run the thing, and (b) the app that real, actually people are jabbing with their fingers and literally touching is still proprietary.
So it's not a problem of too much open source; it's a problem of not enough, and a problem of eschewing with the user-focused underpinnings of free software along the way, to instead follow the career devopser's AWS/GitHub/whatever-powered path while advertising it as win. To borrow liberally from Alan Kay, the computing revolution hasn't been won—because it has not yet even happened.
Corporations have nothing to do with community or people or ethical standards or environmental stuff or privacy. For a company an open source license is nothing else than the code and a license. For them, this is a very narrow legal question.
Corporations does not care about much but shareholders' interests. If you want to change that, you need to come up with a different system than capitalism, which encourages the standards you want to see.
Capitalism doesn't _require_ the heartless pursuit of shareholder value. You're confusing the system with one particular ideology.
Changing incentives, standards and cultural norms absolutely is possible within a capitalist system. In fact, it's required. Otherwise, capitalist economies quickly descend into oligarchies with skewed markets that favor those with all the capital.
If profit were the only motive without any other rules in play, that wouldn't be capitalism at all. We need interventions in order to preserve a healthy system. To suggest otherwise is to defend an ideology that isn't capitalism itself.
It's very disappointing, not the laws called "facts" but this disjunction of the community arguing or even joking around simple people stuff credits. Which costs nothing to do it.
For me this never ending OSS disagreement is just an excuse to take just benefits of the community but with zero retribution (there is no progress on that).
Someday, people will understand that Software is crafted by humans but not by a bunch of companies or self-thought computers.
If you choose a license which explicitly lets them, and they do, then appealing to community is simply silly. If community and reciprocity is important to you, you simply must choose a GPL-like license that requires it.
If you don't want it, simply say so! But if you say you don't care... don't complain when people do.
This, incidentally, is why I tend to prefer the AGPL for stuff I write myself, as it aligns most closely with this "digital public square" idea. I'd simply rather not have an Amazon use my work in this sort of taking-without-giving way at all.
Meanwhile, the open source code I write for my employer is Apache 2.0 licensed because the permissive licenses seem to be the most friendly towards large corporations and hence is what they prefer.
In what world does any company use open source software to save money??
What is the alternative? Develop everything yourself in-house? That's not just expensive, it's dumb, because you'll get worse/less reliable software in general.
This is incredibly naive. FOSS ultimately is business (if the code has any real value) and that's why there are licenses, to keep industry in 'check'. If RMS shared your optimism there would be no FOSS. Business are not people, they are entities driven by profit and the limits of law. Call it greed if you want but that's how you get endless $1 loafs of bread and the ability to fly anywhere in the US for a couple hundred bucks or less. If you really want something to be so, get it in writing. There is no 'community' like you illude to. Maybe in certain corners of the web or for some more notable projects, but there is plenty of FOSS that is really the backbone of a lot of sw and non sw infrastructure that is contributed to almost exclusively by corporations that are in competition with each other. FOSS is not just web devs hanging out on twitter making some app with a cute logo that will be forgotten in 3 years. There is big business going on and without a good license you have nothing.
I see what you mean, but in this particular case, there are licenses that explicitly require the sort of attribution that the tweeter was asking for - e.g. the BSD license with the "advertising clause", or maybe the AGPL. For some reason, open source developers are choosing not to use these licenses, and complaining about it later.
If it were the case that AWS broke some unspoken social convention that is hard to legally enforce, I'd be more sympathetic. But it feels more like the author made a choice to license their software using Apache 2 over other licenses.
A lot of how people and even companies conduct themselves has as much to do with cultural norms as it does with strict legal requirements.
It looks like Matt Asay, the lead for the open source and marketing team at AWS, has already reached out and said he's looking into it (and thanked Tim for the contribution).
I think there's generally a cultural norm to recognize an individual's contributions in general, especially when freely given.
If the comments on here largely echoed that sentiment and demonstrated that it was a cultural norm, expect AWS (and others) to be more likely to adhere to it in the future — it costs almost nothing, but there's definitely a value in having a positive reputation.
We do have the capacity as a community to define and uphold such cultural norms. Laws and licenses are not as binary as code.
You'd have to get the warm and fuzzy emotional parts (community, public square, commons) codified into the license in order to enforce that "higher standard".
I think recognition by AWS would have been nice (win-win for both parties) but lack of it does not warrant public shaming.
If someone doesn't thank you for your "free" services, then keep your head down, plow ahead and take comfort in knowing you're doing a good enough job for a company like Amazon to use your stuff. And if that's not enough, send them a private message and let them know how you feel.
Given that everyone thinks like me, I wonder if some of the "Your license didn't say they couldn't." comments might be a defensive reaction to what they see as an unjustified public shaming. Like an unjustified honk on the road. This is twitter at its best right? Someone says something that pushes the right buttons (intentionally or not), people kick it up a notch by reacting defensively and we're off to the races!
You are talking about a trillion dollar company. I am sure their feeling wasn't hurt from "public shaming" Please save your empathy for the independent open source developer who spent his valuable hours on the project.
Open source software is more than a license and code.
Nope. You are thinking "Free Software". "Open Source" is "just" that: a legal license which may or may not have ethical considerations and fuzzy feelings.
Is it possible to have a license that have different requirements for human beings and non-human beings(organizations, corporations, bots, etc). It feel like the author is upset because AWS is not a human being.
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[ 4.7 ms ] story [ 346 ms ] threadWe should certainly also update legislation to force them to do things ethically, but it's not always possible to cover every possible case and thus our society depends on at least some level of corporate ethics.
That type of response to pressure isn't necessarily of a moral nature. If your customers are boycotting you for not including skub in your product, your choice to include skub in the future could simply be an effort to maintain your customer base, regardless of what moral values skub (non-)inclusion represents.
People should be able to comfortably use software within the bounds of the license without worrying about the author coming along and then shaming them for not complying with an additional set of implicit constraints.
Yes, it would have been nice for Amazon to acknowledge the original author. But given that they are not obligated to, it's unfair to act as if they are at fault for not doing so.
Open source licenses only work because the community adopts them as a standard.
In an enterprise company, it's _much_ easier to use something with an established licence. Having "MIT with attribution" might be waved through by a standing policy. Having "my custom MIT fork" needs Legal involved & may not be a hill to die on so just get ditched instead.
This worked by:
- The PM set some broad brush requirements.
- An engineer saw there was some useful code.
- They/their infrastructure checked that it was under a sensible license.
- They added it
- They released it
- Someone noticed that their product was being used under the license that they had released it under.
- ..
- Big deal?
This is full clone of the original project, not "some code".
There has to be daylight between legal "fault" or obligation and courtesy. The author isn't going on a tirade, he made a quip.
We have faculties, as humans, that aren't strictly legible in the way a license or legal code is. Laws are not a substitute for custom or courtesy. We do need both. No one said they stole. They said they were discourteous.
I also did not mean "fault" in the legal sense, but rather in the sense of courtesy. It is not a faux pas to comply neatly with the terms of a public contract. What you're suggesting is that Amazon erred in not mentioning the author, but the fact that is visible to everyone in the license is that the author does not care about attribution.
I don't like the insinuation that a license can be non-exhaustive in its conditions for the "correct" use of open-source software. You shouldn't run the risk of offending an author by violating some tacit, contradictory rule.
So I'm free to treat you like an absolutely piece of shit, be a raging asshole at you, and you're going to defend my horrendous treatment of you just because legally I'm allowed to and you failed to make a contract with me saying I have to be nice in excruciating detail that's legally enforceable?
This is not even an analogy, it's what is being discussed. AWS didn't do anything illegal with regards to their usage of open-source, but we live in a society, and we do have innumerable tacit rules. One of them is that you should give credit to where credit is due.
It is also rude to sell someone else's work without permission. But if they choose a software license without a non-commercial clause, it is no longer rude: and this implies that the absence of a feature in a license is a kind of approval of its opposite.
If you choose a license without an attribution clause in it, you are admitting, publicly, that you do not care about attribution - not that you require, nor that you forbid it, just that you are ambivalent. If somebody goes on to use your code without attribution, you are wrong to then point out that they have been "rude" to you, because you have already declared your indifference.
I'm not suggesting that unwritten rules are bad. I'm suggesting that trying to introduce unwritten rules to a system where written rules (i.e. licenses) already exist is a bad thing. Software licensing already sits at the intersection of legal and social obligations, because attribution is a feature with essentially no legal impact; treating a software license as a social contract is not a mistake.
Also, it's not like we're talking about arcane pleasantries that no one could have anticipated. Say JKRR opens Harry Potter, copyleft or something. You record an audio version and sell it with great success. Is it not obviously courteous to mention her in some way?
It's even moreso, if you are aws, and JKR is just a regular author.
It's not like anyone who uses a library is expected to perform a ritual dance. It's common sense basics and if you get it wrong nothing happens. Doesn't seem like a lot to ask.
It's a rather pointless burden and not without cost, as it can make it incompatible with other licenses.
It's reasonable to expect some credit to be acknowledged even when it's not mandated by law. Just common courtesy.
If attribution is needed, put it in the license.
If I look through the menus of my oldish (not smart) Panasonic flatscreen tv, there is a menu option that displays all the licenses of the open source software used.
If there is, it's a space that you can minimize using licensing terms, and as a user I will assume that the licensing terms are chosen by the authors in a fashion that best represents their interests. Especially since so many template licenses exist that address this exact problem.
> I don't like this idea that you have no right to complain about something if you haven't specifically banned it in a legally enforceable license.
I think it's unfair to imply that the post you respond to represents that idea, if that's what you're doing. Although worded frankly, it's a constructive suggestion for what proprietors can do to prevent this. It's not a new problem.
My company heavily depends on OS from some great projects: we make money based on other people's hard work too.
Just a short "shout out" would have been nice. We do that with many open source projects, or we sponsor them. And we are a tiny tiny company.
(edit: corrected amount, thx jimhi).
I really hate this happens to people. :(
How does that even work, anyway? If the developer were outside of America, would it still have to be taken to the country where the company resides? There's no international court I know of that would handle these kind of things.
The conversation ends there, doesn't it?
It's like not saying thanks to the barista when you get your coffee. Not the end of the world, but it's still a touch rude.
Maybe the developers would like to say thanks to barista but lawyers said to the developers to not talk to the barista no matter what since it's safer to say nothing than risk saying something wrong.
It's not befitting a large enterprise like AWS to tell their prospective customers that they are just wrapping their infra around free software in their marketing copy. If that single sentence even slightly impresses upon .1% of their potential customers that they ought to spin it up on their own infrastructure, obviating their need to pay for the service, that's plenty of disincentive to add the message.
Also, consider that they rely on having a positive reputation to attract engineering talent and also to continue to get third party developers to release their infrastructural code under permissive licenses.
Personally, I think OSS licences should be changed to prohibit unpaid use by any entity that has a single stakeholder worth more than a billion dollars. That way the startups and medium sized businesses around the world can benefit and the tech lottery winners pay something reasonable ($1m a year, say) to support OSS.
There will be projects for sure that would love their software were used by AWS and other companies without paying them, but that will only create a race to the bottom. We should stop exploitation of engineers by these giant companies.
So, once an author is dead, it should be illegal to sell anything they created? Or should ownership rights in content for the estate last forever?
Your idea is terrible when examined in detail.
Pick something like the MariaDB or CockroachDB license if you don't want Amazon to provide a hosted version of your software.
If trust and reputation were enough, we would not need licenses. The GPL is great and had the impact it did exactly because it forced people to do things.
You're not legally required to say "Hi" when you run into people you know and making it legally enforceable would be a legal nightmare, but it's the decent thing to do.
They are of course well within their rights as per the license to behave like this but there's a notion of being courteous, grateful, and constructive in the OSS world that comes with being a responsible OSS citizen and that goes a long way to ensure people volunteer to help you out with bugs, support, change requests, etc. It doesn't cost anything to just reach out and give this person some kudos. It's the right thing to do.
Amazon is being a bit insensitive here and this sounds to me like somebody up high ought to do a bit of yelling internally about acting professionally and not needlessly burning bridges with the OSS people that they depend on for their core business. At least I'd be all over this if I were confronted with this kind of behavior by one of my colleagues. Not cool. A public apology would go a long way to fixing this; maybe a couple of lines in the readme. Doesn't cost a thing.
AWS did something rude, unprofessional, and indicative of bad OSS citizenship. The fact that the lawyers can sign off on it is irrelevant.
If fact someone should come up with a well written licence that adds conditions when the licensee revenue is over a certain (large) amount, like say royalties. Everyone should be happy with that.
I assume he personally thanked all of the technologies that he's used as well?
Giving attribution (and monetary compensation) to the lawyers who make open source licensing function is also a thing.
"The USER is required to publicly thank AUTHOR, and make the thanking reproducible in every copy of the derived work that uses this software."
You don't need a lawyer for that. And if someone wants to use his work without attribution, they are free to negotiate a copy with different licence terms directly with the author and provide a compensation.
It is undoubtedly discourteous of AWS to release an OSS fork as a new feature without crediting the original author. It is not the end of the world. It is not a reason to go and change your licenses to make things more difficult for the other 95% of developers. But it is a reason to say "some people at AWS are just dang ol' jerks."
Companies want to take and exploit free/opensource licenses in exactly this way.
By putting in a clause for attribution for example, you winnow away the companies like Amazon who would totally want to fork and re-release without crediting you.
If a company doesn't want to credit you, and your license is dissuading them from forking your project, then the non-standard license has achieved its goal.
You can't have it both ways. It's like people complaining that the GPL is "viral". That's the whole point of it. Companies that don't want to re-contribute their source changes are dissuaded from using it at all.
If you put an attribution clause in the license, the companies that don't touch your code is the company you never wanted to use your code at all. You can't have it both ways. You can't say "I need the exposure so I use a totally permissive license" and then say "Oh but I actually want attribution in a way that if people knew about this requirement, wouldn't use it to begin with"
The main reason it was dropped was because it created an incompatibility with the GPL. The other reason was because operating systems became an unwieldy mess of attributions.
Can someone check the source code of the extension?
(It's certainly weird that 30+ comments in, everyone else is taking sides without even questioning the IMO not terribly well supported premise.)
Edit: Okay, judging from NOTICES.txt it is.
https://twitter.com/maxibanki/status/1317071448322789376?s=1...
However. He has every right to point out that they are using his code. And I think it would be at least polite to mention that, and it is in my opinion impolite not to mention it.
And actually a little misleading when they don't mention using an open source system that is similar.
And it's not like the fact that he didn't say that in his license means he is not allowed to mention he made that software.
So I think better late than never, put the requirements you want in the license for credit. Or go AGPL or whatever. Although obviously that's not retroactive on the previous version.
This also proves that someone thinks it's a business. So I feel like there might be an opportunity to launch a competitor, with a main advantage that they have the actual talent that created the system.
This is fine of course. We have many competitors.
Specially license tailored against every one of them, by name?
EDIT: notice that usage of the AGPL produces the desired effect, while still being free software (which it wouldn't be the case if you excluded specific users in your license terms).
That's due to fact that AGPL's _user interaction_ clauses can be too vague in legal terms, in a way that many internal use cases could be litigated as a user interaction over a network.
It has been discussed before here:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16636963
I could bet a decent amount that AWS legal department does not even know this was forked from OSS.
This is probably some dev or PM who found out about the project and decided they were in-line for a promotion using someone else's work.
- He's not complaining that Amazon forked his code with Apache license. He admits he also uses other open source with permissive licenses
- He just thought it would be nice/courteous/polite/etc if Amazon acknowledge/recognized/credited/mentioned/thanked his original project that they forked from.
The twitter reply of "user facing open source should have been AGPL" and replies in this thread of "you used the wrong license" don't really cover it.
In other words, I'm not aware of a permissive license that's the same as BSD/Apache with the only difference in that also says "use it as you wish but you must mention my name when you're a commercial enterprise making a splashy product announcement".
E:
who downvoted this, care to explain? have you ever eard of the jslint license? you can add the fuck you want to one's software terms
if you want a nod if used as a part of a software, just add it!
well yeah, that the point, you either demand a nod, or suck it up and stop asking things that weren't in the license
Ah yes, this ironclad legalese.
> [...] (reasons)
Well, then why go on something as big and public like Twitter and HN to post about it in the first place? Send a mail to the team of AWS and get in touch. I don't get the point of this tweet, either.
Edit: Those downvotes are not really giving me answers. Anyone care to explain the issue?
What makes you believe they are not? Or rather, what do you think they are apparently obligated to do? What's the issue here?
> The bad PR is that this at-a-glance anti-Amazon post is at the top of a popular tech forum.
I don't see the anti-Amazon part. What I do see is a developer that either has a license issue or simply wants some attention.
The OP seems to be disappointed with how they handled it, and an Amazon agent even replied to agree and apologize. Plus, this is not the first time that people have reported similar feelings about Amazon's lack of appreciation for the permissive open source code they use.
> what do you think they are apparently obligated to do?
I don't know exactly, but I think it starts with making efforts to maintain good relationships with the open source community members who work for free to enable Amazon's (and others) products to exist. Regardless of whether they explicitly demand it up front.
> In other words, I'm not aware of a permissive license that's the same as BSD/Apache with the only difference in that also says "use it as you wish but you must mention my name when you're a commercial enterprise making a splashy product announcement".
Yes. What we need is ABSD, AMIT or AAPL where the first A stands for appreciation / Attribution
E.g., a company arranging for its shareholders to be able to report dividends as capital gains rather than ordinary income by doing a fractional stock split followed by a mandatory buyback instead of declaring a dividend, with the split/buyback designed so that each shareholder ends up with exactly the same percentage ownership they had before and with cash equal to the exact amount that would have been otherwise distributed as a dividend [1], that's a loophole.
An author picking an open source license that specifically and intentionally allows anyone to use their software and make money from it without having to give the author anything is not a loophole.
[1] Yes, this actually happened around 100 years ago. The rules on buybacks were changed to fix it. But them some legitimate cases of buybacks that should have been capital gains became ordinary income, so more fixes were needed. The result is that what once needed at most a line in the tax code, if it even needed mention at all, became several paragraphs. This is why we do not have a small, simple tax code--there is a massive incentive for people to find even the tiniest loophole and exploit it, and so you end up with multiple paragraphs for things you at first would think could be done in a sentence. (And don't say a flat tax would help...almost all of the complexity in the tax code is in determining what gets taxes, not how much the tax is once you have figured out the what).
I don't need a royalty from my fixes, I was compensated for my time. I don't even care about a credit, but I understand some do.
I guess I can see OSS as a "free food" stall. Almost everyone can have a bite but I'm not fine with billionaires coming in to steal the recipes. They already have the means to increase their wealth efficiently, society would have much benefit if these mechanisms of wealth increase involved giving some of it back.
Unity's license is what we're aiming for yeah? Use it freely but at a certain dollar threshold, contribute back monetarily?
> 3. All advertising materials mentioning features or use of this software must display the following acknowledgement: This product includes software developed by the <organization>.
There's a good reason why we no longer use BSD-4 anymore.
https://www.gnu.org/licenses/bsd.html
> The result is a plethora of licenses, requiring a plethora of different sentences. When people put many such programs together in an operating system, the result is a serious problem. Imagine if a software system required 75 different sentences, each one naming a different author or group of authors. To advertise that, you would need a full-page ad. This might seem like extrapolation ad absurdum, but it is actual fact. In a 1997 version of NetBSD, I counted 75 of these sentences. (Fortunately NetBSD has decided to stop adding them, and to remove those it could.)
A idea is to reword and relax this license: Similar to LGPL, you can skip the acknowledgement if it's used in an unmodified form. But it doesn't really solve the problem - if the original project has been forked by the community, the exception becomes useless again. The next problem is that, it doesn't really cover all cases - in a previous incident involved Microsoft, Microsoft didn't even use a single line of the original code at all, it was just an inspiration from its framework, and the author was upset for not receiving any acknowledgement... Another idea is using AGPL's approach and targets cloud providers only, but still, it doesn't cover all the cases here.
I'm not sure whether using copyright to require acknowledgement is a good idea after all. In the academia, copyright and credit/attribution are two entirely independent process. The credit is not a legal matter, but simply a form of code of conduct and informal politeness. Perhaps promoting a code of conduct for acknowledgement in the industry regarding the use of FOSS could work better.
Personally I'd rather have their source be released like AGPL, as that would credit the authors and let me see their changes.
It wouldn't be too hard to maintain though. Could probably mostly pull it out of git even.
https://github.com/flowplayer/flowplayer/blob/dev/LICENSE.md
"The GPL requires that you not remove the Flowplayer logo and copyright notices from the user interface. See section 5.d below."
This license is also sometimes called the “4-clause BSD license”.
This is a lax, permissive non-copyleft free software license with a serious flaw: the “obnoxious BSD advertising clause”. The flaw is not fatal; that is, it does not render the software nonfree. But it does cause practical problems, including incompatibility with the GNU GPL.
https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html#OriginalBSD
The Flowplayer Free version is released under the GNU GENERAL PUBLIC LICENSE Version 3 (GPL). The GPL requires that you not remove the Flowplayer logo and copyright notices from the user interface. See section 5.d below.
You may convey a work based on the Program, or the modifications to produce it from the Program, in the form of source code under the terms of section 4, provided that you also meet all of these conditions: * If the work has interactive user interfaces, each must display Appropriate Legal Notices;
Anyone except the contributors themselves who would forever get a piece of the Linux fame, but they are just like, free labor, amirite? /s
It would have a dozen proprietary forks.
Aren't the BSDs a counterexample to that?
Why? There's plenty of permissive F/OSS projects with large numbers of contributors.
> It would have a dozen proprietary forks.
Probably, but proprietary forks don't stop F/OSS contributions. They can even be the source of them, as upstreaming everything that isn't secret sauce reduced the cost of maintaining the proprietary fork. A number of the big sources of F/OSS contributions to Postgres are maintainers of proprietary downstream distributions (I don't know that all are strictly forks, since I think the proprietary bits of at least some are using the extension mechanism.)
Companies invest in developing Linux to create a commodity they can leverage to sell their products and services. The GPL ensures the investment remains a commodity and cannot be used in proprietary products that can't be also leveraged by the initial contributor.
There was a lot of BSD in the core of every proprietary Unix, each tied to a given manufacturer.
Except MacOS X, the major proprietary Unixes all predated permissively-licensed releases of BSD, and the early permissively licensed releases were under a copyright cloud for years that prevented anyone from relying on them for commercial downstream distributions.
At least, I've seen the Copyright notice for the California Board of Regents in the macOS startup debugging.
Or are you talking about how if you download the Chrome extension and extract it you can see him referenced in NOTICES.txt? https://twitter.com/maxibanki/status/1317071448322789376
Thanks for informing us with the clarification. The original tweet was 11:16 UTC. This HN thread was submitted 11:23 UTC. That twitter reply showing the acknowledgement in "NOTICES.txt" was later at 11:54 UTC.
https://twitter.com/maxibanki/status/1317071448322789376
Here's the timeline I saw:
11:16 - A person blames AWS of something without additional context and understanding
11:23 - Presumably the same person posts on HN (to signal boost? farm karma from the anti-Amazon crowd sure to pop up? both?)
Never:Never - OP apologizes for rousing the HN pitchfork mob
I'll be downvoted, but that's a symptom of how poorly the audience of this site understands the issues at hand. (myself included)
But I read the post before I comment.
I don't usually read through files like ~/.config/chromium/Default/Extensions/bhdnlmmgiplmbcdmkkdfplenecpegfno/0.0.1_0/NOTICE.txt (though perhaps I should).
I told them that if they wanted me to submit it on Thursday, they shouldn't've set the boundary for Friday at midnight. That didn't go over too well.
In practice this often means that “from midnight on Monday to midnight on Tuesday” is a 48-hour interval so far as consumers are concerned. I recommend advertising things like cut-off times as “11:59pm” and friends, when possible.
Also, my time formatter turns “12:00” into “12 noon” following weary experience of people who confuse 12:00 with midnight.
I generally insist on midnight being 0:00 or 24:00 for much the same reasons.
Probably a typo. But I think you mean “no one is disputing they have acted legally”.
Same here, if the developer wanted something to happen, then he should have put it in the license. Otherwise, there's no reason to be whining that something that was NOT expected to happen (as per the license) did not happen.
Typically when a product or service is released, if it's built significantly upon something else, you at least throw out a quick acknowledgement. Sure, it's not the law, it's just polite/kind/whatever nice word you prefer to use.
All sorts of communities have various 'norms' of this nature which you are totally entitled to ignore but that doesn't mean they're not there.
Every time I come across a thread - on any forum - where people are educating others that something is a social norm, it is because it is not. They merely want it to be.
If you have a good number of people disagreeing on it, take it as a humble suggestion that norms differ across geos, industries, culture, etc. Don't insist on it, because it will come across as an imposition.
Unrelated to the content in my comment above, I look at this from the same lens I look at products in my engineering world. We don't find a need to credit Claude Shannon, John Von Neumann, Tony Hoare, etc in all our products. I find this to be OK.
Saying "thank you" and giving credit to someone who did you a solid is pretty universally a norm.
> If you have a good number of people disagreeing on it, take it as a humble suggestion that norms differ across geos, industries, culture, etc.
Or, there's just the fraction of people who disregard and push back on norms.
> We don't find a need to credit Claude Shannon, John Von Neumann, Tony Hoare, etc in all our products. I find this to be OK.
It's a bit different here, in that the people you cite are titans who developed ideas that might be a portion of a work... which is a bit different from using the work wholesale. I don't think anyone would expect Amazon to thank/cite/acknowledge something they used that comprised 1% of a product... but when it reaches a very high proportion it's time to mention it.
Further, these were academics. We do have a norm of citing them when we're deeply using and building upon their work academically.
How much time have you spent looking for counterexamples in the society where you live? Where people do something for the common good and most consumers do not say "Thank you". Have you done this exercise?
> Or, there's just the fraction of people who disregard and push back on norms
This is a convenient, self-fulfilling narrative. It is also pitting you into an adversarial position with someone. It's highly risky to insist on a norm and accuse others of not honoring it - and then be viewed as someone who is inflexible. It's your choice, though.
I've spent a whole lot of time thinking about norms and observing their observance, enforcement, and what kinds of circumstances they tend to be disregarded. I've read a lot of the lit, too, thank you.
> This is a convenient, self-fulfilling narrative.
So is refusing to acknowledge the existence of norms because some people refuse to acknowledge them. Ultimately, our social reality is something we pretend into existence together.
> It is also pitting you into an adversarial position with someone. It's highly risky to insist on a norm and accuse others of not honoring it - and then be viewed as someone who is inflexible. It's your choice, though.
Whinging that someone broke norm A [e.g. seemed ungrateful] and thinking less of people/entities that you've heard have done the same is pretty cheap and isn't likely to earn you value judgments yourself.
Then I hope you've noticed that there are instances in society where "Saying thank you and giving credit to someone who did you a solid" is not the norm.
> So is refusing to acknowledge the existence of norms because some people refuse to acknowledge them.
We are in agreement here.
> Whinging that someone broke norm A [e.g. seemed ungrateful] and thinking less of people/entities that you've heard have done the same is pretty cheap and isn't likely to earn you value judgments yourself.
I have no idea what you're trying to say here. This sounds precisely what people are doing: Whining that Amazon seemed ungrateful and thinking less of people who do likewise. Which is orthogonal to what I'm saying.
> This sounds precisely what people are doing: Whining that Amazon seemed ungrateful and thinking less of people who do likewise.
Yup, and while there's variation in the hivemind, all in all I don't think a very large fraction of it is snapping back and thinking of the author as inflexible. So p'raps it's not so highly risky.
Crediting the work of a project you directly forked to create your own is a social norm in the open source world. Happily, Amazon has now edited the post to include such a credit: https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2020/10/amazon-cl...
This is merely repeating the same statement over and over ("Yes it is" "No it isn't" "Yes it is" "No it isn't" ad nauseum). It's not furthering the conversation.
That Amazon decided to do it has no bearing on whether it is a norm or not.
You have 8 hours to do your work in. If you need more than that then you're either slacking off or incompetent. If you've been given more than 8 hours work to do then that's a scheduling problem you need to take up with your manager.
Everyone worked their arses off all day, and at 5pm the entire office went to the pub to socialise. Some only stayed for a short time then went home. Others stayed on for hours. But staying in the office after 5pm was not acceptable.
As a developer, it was great. Interruptions were always pertinent, because all the socialising happened in the pub. I could code in peace for ~8 hours, which tbh is about my limit anyway, after that my quality goes downhill fast. And then we all hung out together. Being a developer who can't do the social thing in work hours with losing massive time to context switching wasn't a social handicap, for once.
Out with social norms and niceties, and in with black letter law?
I don't want to legally demand a specific acknowledgement; I know that this can have unintended consequences and greatly complicates adoption.
Also: If my stuff is used at the periphery of something you're doing, I don't really care. On the other hand, if you get to market by largely just repackaging what I've made, it seems that by social norms I'm due a hat tip, whether or not it's legally demanded.
Nothing you do for your employer as part of work should be considered "courtesy" or a "social nicety".
Isn't that the whole point behind the rule of law and the civil society?
Anything that isn't well understood or known in advance of someone engaging in an activity, and then later faces unfair retribution because apparently they didn't do what wasn't told to them that needed be done, or did something that wasn't told to them shouldn't be done.
All these "social norm" sounds like guilt trip and power grabs to me. You did something you said was free and that you were giving it to me no string attached, then you come back and guilt trip me saying that there were in fact strings attached and that you expected things in return.
Now, yes I understand that maybe when you said hey this is open source with Apache license, you had in mind an audience of students, or one man startups, or hobbyist, or amateurs, and hadn't really thought if it applied to big corps. And I actually wonder how the courts normally handle this, when someone who put the conditions forward first was in a position where they couldn't have anticipated the event and thus couldn't have pre-conditioned it. I'm not too sure how to handle it myself, but here I'm guessing is a lesson to learn for others, choose your license carefully, think about the various possibility.
Your argument self-contradicts. You assert, broadly, if it's legal it's OK. The "unfair retribution" of people getting annoyed about it and complaining is also legal, so that should be OK, too. :P
> Now, yes I understand that maybe when you said hey this is open source with Apache license, you had in mind an audience of students, or one man startups, or hobbyist, or amateurs, and hadn't really thought if it applied to big corps.
Nah, when I said "Apache License", I meant that legal license. But that doesn't mean doing some things that effectively cost nothing, that exceed the license requirements, aren't socially customary.
There's no law that says you have to say "thank you" when someone renders you a service or has made something that makes your life easier or lets you make a bunch of money, but if you stand on legal grounds to avoid saying "thanks" you might be a dick, and people might call you out for being a dick.
I think this is me criticizing those same "social norms". In my opinion, it is unfair to guilt trip someone or have hidden expectations when someone does a good deed for you. Especially when you decided to do the deed on your own and you went and promoted it for others to benefit and use.
Obviously it's nice when you do something and others thank you and acknowledge you for it. But it isn't nice when someone complains they're not getting a thank you for something they choose to do willingly and weren't asked to do.
Now I reckon here it's a bit different, because we're talking about two actors of very uneven footing, and I would like to see Amazon being more thankful and recognising the hard work of open source contributors. I agree with that sentiment. I just wanted to say that in general, yes those social norms are often against what I'd consider a free society, since they are just another axis of power to force you into behaviors you might not have agreed to participate in.
If you benefit from something someone else does, you owe them a debt of gratitude. It's not a legal debt, and it's not denominated in dollars and cents... but you shouldn't be surprised that there are norms of repaying this debt in various ways and that people/entities that excessively "take" from the commons incur reputational damage.
> I just wanted to say that in general, yes those social norms are often against what I'd consider a free society, since they are just another axis of power to force you into behaviors you might not have agreed to participate in.
This just feels like hyperbole to me. Expecting acknowledgment from someone when they've benefitted from something you've done is not an unreasonable ask. Getting shamed when you don't do this isn't a significant curtailment of liberty.
Yes and this is what I'm criticizing. If I am in dept, then say so and make it explicit to me before I take the dept unknowingly, otherwise I'm sorry, but I will in turn shame you for being a cry baby and I won't abide by these norms, because I disagree with them.
To me, social norm is just another form of force to impose ones will on others. And thus an attack on liberty. And the idea of a social contract is that I consent to give away some liberties for being able to participate in a functioning society. But when the social contract isn't explicit, and expectations arn't stated, I find that unfair, no matter if the force is physical or psychological. The act of coming back after the deed, and saying that accepting the deed bound me to X,Y,Z where none of those was stipulated, ya I find that crooked. At this point anything can be stipulated. For example, what is Amazon supposed to do here? Should they offer a job? Pay up some amount of money? Cancel their project? Put a banner on amazon.com thanking the contributor? How long should the banner stay up? Etc. They're just at the mercy of the wims of others, and they might start to regret having taken this "dept" which they didn't know came with all these strings attached. And by the way, it's not just that they didn't know, on fact, the author had written down in details as part of the attached license what all the expectations were, but now claims that more was implicitly expected based on some loosely defined social norms. Had the work been unlicensed, Amazon would not have used it.
P.S.: But again, just to be clear, I'm talking about the principles at play here, in this particular scenario, I acknowledge this isn't like a massive issue and a crazy demand or attack on Amazon's liberty. And I'd be really amazed and impressed and would think highly of Amazon if they went above and beyond the license here.
Welp, good luck with that. There's tens of thousands of social rules that are understood by 99% of people, and you're not going to find an explicit list somewhere of how far to stand away from someone when talking to them, to what kinds of initial conversations are appropriate, to saying "thank you" after someone gives you something, to attributing an idea to someone else, etc. And failing to follow them will rapidly earn you scorn.
> For example, what is Amazon supposed to do here? Should they offer a job? Pay up some amount of money? Cancel their project? Put a banner on amazon.com thanking the contributor?
If the product is 98% built upon some open source stuff, you put in the 2nd or 3rd paragraph description that it's "built upon" or "powered by" or "makes use of." Even a footnote might be OK. This is pretty obviously the right thing to do, and it's also helpful to your users in understanding what your product is.
I pointed out that the minimum is to be expected because I’ve seen it mentioned a few times that’s all they did. Like the expectation is that they should have done more.
It’s a company forking a project, I would expect nothing else. It would be notable if he got a T-shirt or something.
As is not doing it.
Perhaps you did not mean to use the word "appropriate"?
Did you copy their inventions 1:1 and rebranded them as your own? No you didn't. You just used them which is different.
On the other hand, fulfilling a request can, and often will, lead to a positive. It's still a request.
If you're going to be upset about it, don't phrase it as a request. A big chunk of the population will be annoyed by it.
Soapbox aside, getting to your comment: If someone is giving me that money unsolicited, I may or may not give a thank you. Context is extremely relevant. I did not give a "Thank you" to the recent stimulus check, for example. And I've definitely had fights with people voluntarily giving me stuff over and over and complaining about my not saying "thank you" (or even worse, not reciprocating). I've had to forbid them from giving me gifts in the future. I'm not saying my attitude is the norm, but it is "one of the norms".
The book Influence covers this topic in a lot of detail, and this is commonly discussed in Negotiations books. The bottom line: Be wary of gifts, and either reject if you suspect reciprocation is desired (which could mean "Thank you"), or make the understanding explicit and keep the reciprocity in mind. Of course, this goes at odds with several cultures.
As much as we like to talk about "open source" culture, it doesn't exist. It gets argued to death every time it comes up, which is a good sign it doesn't exist. A big chunk of the SW world, if not the majority, do not feel a need to reciprocate - even with a thank you. (Most of that chunk are OK giving a "Thank you", and this is not a contradiction).
https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/amazon-redshift-the-new-aws...
But if you try to use the same schema design from a standard Postgres database and use the same query patterns, you will be sorely disappointed. Redshift uses a columnar store and is an OLAP database as opposed to Postgres which is a traditional database.
https://github.com/citusdata/cstore_fdw
Business offering a software service and open-source developer are not colleagues. One is selling a service, the other is writing code, there is simply no comparison.
Obviously there is no legal requirement, but would it be that hard for Amazon to include a "forked from..." or "built off of...", etc. to the announcement and product pages, if it really is heavily based off of another work?
This whole thing is very reminiscent of the Occupy Wall Street movement. People are very sensitive to the injustices they perceive themselves as having to endure especially in relation to those wealthier than them. But where's the willingness to jump out of local scope and apply the same principle globally (and reflexively)? It seems to be absent.
But even if FAANG don't typically give credit to projects they fork, that doesn't mean it is ok. That's like saying all the big political parties gerrymander, so gerrymandering is ok.
It seems to me it would just require mentioning it in some CREDITS.txt or whatever, which the other lincenses also do.
Totem has an example https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/totem/-/blob/b4050524d6cd961b...
> Rather than modifying the GPL, please use the exception mechanism offered by GPL version 3.
Somewhat relevant: https://opensource.google/docs/thirdparty/licenses/#wtfpl-no...
There is: the four-clause (original) BSD license (https://choosealicense.com/licenses/bsd-4-clause/). Pretty much no one uses it anymore because things quickly get unwieldy if you have to mention ten or twenty projects you used code from in all advertising.
That is, how can you know who the copyright holder is if you don't do that?
Considering that not all projects are littered with (c) Stack Overflow User, I may have the wrong idea, but it is definitely something I have seen somewhere. I am not a lawyer, obviously.
How is he not complaining. He totally is.
> He's not complaining that Amazon forked his code with Apache license.
The poster was indicating what part of Amazon's behavior he wasn't complaining about, not asserting that he wasn't complaining at all.
I find this entire thread absurd though...if the person wanted to get fair credit, they should have used a different license. It's like saying "Hey, totally ok to have a beer from my fridge. But I'd really really plead you to drop in a buck... but only if you wish though. But I highly recommend it. It would be shame if you don't. Most people don't want to be shamed do they?"
Just be straight forward and put that in the license. Otherwise, it is truly optional and should be treated as such.
As much as I dislike having trillion dollar corporation not give a credit, that's why we have licenses.
- I don't want to use restrictive (GPL) license like those business-hating FSF folks–I want people to use my software _freely_
- Hey! A big business used my software in a way that rubs me the wrong way (in this case, without giving prominent enough attribution)! Not nice!
What's not nice about it? You use a permissive license but you're going to get upset if people follow the letter of your license? This doesn't make sense. This might make sense if there were not alternative licenses but there are, and the author chose not to use them. This seems like playing a mind-game. "It's permissive! Use it how you like! (but I'm going to be upset if you don't follow the unwritten attribution guideline I have in my head)." How is it fair to expect other parties to meet your secret expectations?
What did AWS do wrong here? Were they supposed to know this guy's unwritten expectations?
> What did AWS do wrong here? Were they supposed to know this guy's unwritten expectations?
I suspect you're either autistic or a lawyer being obstinate. Human society is full of unwritten expectations, we learn these quickly as a child or face social consequences. No where in the law is it written that you must say 'please' and 'thank you' but it's also expected and people are less likely to do things for you again if you don't.
So consider this situation now:
_A person (the dev) did something nice for someone else (a trillion dollar company) and they didn't bother to say thank you._
The answer you're looking for this guy wrote up 10+ years ago: If you don't like the way people are using your work, release your next work under a different license that more closely matches what you want. Learn from the mistake & don't make it again.
Maybe I'm autistic (the diagnostic criteria are very fuzzy around the edges) but I'm not sure what that has to do with my argument.
The fair usage principle can create much more value than complex and often unnecessary strict regulations.
I guess the author would not have complained if a small company had done what aws did just to stay afloat.
It is like fair use: They guy that uses google drive to backup youtube in its entirety is not doing anything illegal. He just demonstrates that he cannot deal with freedom.
There's a number of things that are strictly speaking legal, but still considered rude. Often, the reputation of a person or business is based at least in part on whether they do the legal bare minimum, or if they hold themselves to some level of higher standard.
I also think there's a difference between attribution because a license requires it (commonly buried several links/pages deep in some obscure "Here's a laundry list of ALL the open source packages we used to build this"), and acknowledging that a _specific_ library powers the core of a new product. I don't know of any license that marks that line.
Frog & scorpion don'cha know.
The other thing that annoys is the fact that the permissiveness of the license is precisely why AWS used it, probably part of why it's popular, why he can tweet about it & build his brand etc. The author has and continues to benefit from the permissiveness of the license. To enjoy the upside of permissive but complain that the downside isn't fair comes off as a bit self-serving.
In my opinion he is violating the spirit of the open source license since he is using extra-legal means to interefere with amazon exercising their rights under the apache license. This is unethical in my opinion
That's called the old BSD 4 clause license. Now you know.
https://spdx.org/licenses/BSD-4-Clause.html
My guess is that none of the people who are lecturing and gloating have ever written anything substantial. Shame on you.
As for the author, it sucks, but companies, moral and law, don't stand on the same side of the balance.
Therefore, shouldn't he be thanking Amazon for spreading his software?
That’s pretty much unrealistic, given how many pieces of oss a project uses.
You're basically implying people who do not subscribe to you philosophy as lazy and/or unproductive.
How is it not treated fairly in a moral sense?
I don’t think many comments are hostile. The title is entirely clickbait, and for generating PR for the author.
Just pointing out the hypocrisy of embracing "openness" and "free software" that anyone could use freely, then getting mad when someone does use it.
Also it's funny to see the FOSS crowd rediscover the need for intellectual property, having denounced it when it was applied in the opposite direction.
https://github.com/awslabs/pgbouncer-rr-patch/
https://github.com/awslabs/pgbouncer-rr-patch/issues/3
> We'd like to rewrite such features for pgbouncer from the ground up but it is impossible to prove to the lawyer that the re-writing is not kind of "derivative works". I believe it is not what you expected, as an opensource project that derived benefit from the whole pgbouncer community.
“3.3 Use Limitation. The Work and any derivative works thereof only may be used or intended for use with the web services, computing platforms or applications provided by Amazon.com, Inc. or its affiliates, including Amazon Web Services, Inc.” from https://github.com/awslabs/pgbouncer-rr-patch/blob/master/LI...
Is this a one off activity, or does Amazon do this regularly as part of their moat?
Given how much AWS relies on developers, it boggles the mind how they get away with this kind of behaviour.
https://twitter.com/maxibanki/status/1317071448322789376
Open source software is more than a license and code. It is a community and the digital public square.
And the Tragedy of the Commons is just as applicable to our public square as it is to William Forster Lloyd's common land.
Either we as a community hold ourselves and others within our community to a higher standard than the text of a license, or licenses will inevitably become increasingly restrictive in the future, to the detriment of all.
Sure, if attribution is a requirement then the natural thing to do is to turn it into a legal requirement. But I don't think that is the discussion here.
It comes down to how we want to treat open source. In order to encourage open source, I believe giving credit, even if not required, is courteous. Corporations are not monolithic entities that are perfectly defined. People work on these corporations.
It will be lot more rude if your coworker now hit social media berating you for stealing other people's ideas. If just office ideas were this important may be they need to be submitted with process of academic journals with proper attribution.
It can't be both ways: "Announcing that take my idea / software and run with it" And if someone does, telling them "you are first rate moocher, aren't ya?"
Would it? I’d be inclined to agree with the coworker.
The message is not ‘stealing other people’s ideas’, it’s ‘stealing other people’s ideas without acknowledgement’.
Huh, I never heard of 'stealing with acknowledgement'. That'd be plain usage.
> I’d be inclined to agree with the coworker.
I'd think that co-worker would be subject of constant derision where people would run every trivial thing by them asking if they had thought it originally.
Edit: To be clear I support directly confronting folks taking ideas often without attribution or taking to higher ups if that is so important. But social shaming means the person better be prepared to live up to much higher public standards than it would be for some interpersonal issue.
In a few places I worked at, this was just par for the course. It's all in the (corporate) game.
As much as decent, polite, and courteous people do exist (and I try to be one of them), it's a fact of life that assholes exist, and they often prosper on the back of such decent people.
Reducing the issue to the bare minimal legal requirement is stooping low, that we cannot expect corporations to behave ethically, with common decency and respect, unless forced to do so by law. Sure, that's the real world, but we should demand better of the people who run and work in these corporations.
Every contract, every law states what we see as the bare minimum required not to be actively harmful. They're society's skeleton. But bodies are more than bone, and societies are more than people doing the bare legal minimum.
Look at what the law requires of parents, for example. Food, shelter, clothing, school attendance, a lack of physical abuse. But parents who do the legal minimum and no more are awful parents, and awful people. But more laws wouldn't help. What kind of law could guarantee love? What kind of police could enforce it?
Community spirit is not something that can be expressed in a contract. Acting like people should have foreseen a particular asshole and tried to defend against them contractually is victim-blaming. The actual solution is for assholes to hear from the community that the behavior isn't welcome.
Some of us think copyright is unfair and we want to use it as little as possible. That means using MIT or BSD licenses.
That doesn't mean we are against attribution. We are only against the use of coercion to get attribution.
We can say "It would be nice if you give attribution" without saying "I'm going to use my legal rights to coerce you into giving me attribution"
As it is today you can use your full control to allow full use with attribution. Of course the "unfairness" probably comes from the fact that you can't force others to do the same.
In my opinion the best option is to keep copyright at "full control" with a time limit. Probably 10-20 years. However that doesn't solve your desire for only attribution.
In the same way that we must continue to steer our car even in the presence of guard rails, we must continue to act morally in the presence of rules.
Unfortunately, there's absolutely nothing about the OSS community that actually instills this mantra in people. I like to think that I also see OSS as a community and digital public square, but there's no universality to that philosophy.
> Either we as a community hold ourselves and others within our community to a higher standard than the text of a license, or licenses will inevitably become increasingly restrictive in the future, to the detriment of all.
There's just no way that the community will ever do this because there are inherently conflicting incentives to participating in OSS. If you tried to explicitly motivate people to do this, you'd immediately get pushback from the individualistic elements of the community that don't want to participate in something that they feel is politically motivated or that Amazon did nothing wrong.
OSS is a great thing that has tremendously benefited the industry, but the idealism of a community acting together without any consequences or incentives to do so is truly folly. As much as I wish OSS had more of a true community feel to it (and I think there are little pockets where this is tangibly felt), OSS largely exists to provide tools for commercial software development. Those people are out to build businesses and accrue wealth, not fortify the OSS community. I'm sure there are people that actually work to accomplish both, but the vast majority of founders and companies I've worked for in my career don't see OSS as a community. They see it as a giant puzzle box where each piece is an OSS project and their goal is connect pieces together in order to sell a product to somebody. Get acquired/IPO and you've solved the puzzle.
I'm beginning to question this. The proliferation and commoditization of F/OSS is what made SaaS business thrive, and made it so that integration and polish is the only avenue left to make a buck, leading to our paltry attention economy, oligopoly, and platform lock-in by network effects. This after decades of personal computing striving to liberate users from mainframes. F/OSS is also drying out - when was the last time you used a piece of software that truly achieved something useful on its own rather than solving a perceived problem that only exists because of the idiosyncratic nature of the web and cloud stacks? Meanwhile, maintainers of popular F/OSS get nothing in return.
Go and Rust. Probably unpopular opinions, but I'm very glad those two languages are open source.
Go and Rust amount to infrastructure, not software that "truly achieve[s] something useful on its own".
Do I think F/OSS played a role in these issues? Absolutely. Do I think it's the primary role in causing these issues? Definitely not. I'd argue that weak antitrust law, ill-intentioned VC money, and lack of oversight of software titans play the biggest role in what you've described here. Yes, F/OSS gave the companies tools to iterate over app development quickly, but they were pushed for hockey stick growth and total market domination by the checkbooks, and the government has completely failed to police their behavior. F/OSS gave people with questionable incentives the ability to do questionable things, but it didn't create the motivation to do those questionable things.
> when was the last time you used a piece of software that truly achieved something useful on its own rather than solving a perceived problem that only exists because of the idiosyncratic nature of the web and cloud stacks?
I actually use a fair amount of F/OSS that is independently useful to me, projects like Hammerspoon, MIDIMonitor, VLC, MuseScore, and others. Yes, the majority of F/OSS that I use is for commercial purposes, but that's certainly not exclusive.
> Meanwhile, maintainers of popular F/OSS get nothing in return.
I completely agree with this, and I think it's one of the most critical problems to the F/OSS movement.
All the time. One I use every day? Emacs. (Which long predates anything web or cloud related.) For a more recently developed example? Guix.
Setting aside the fact that a very large portion of the software I use outside work is free software.
That's because of developers' (read: devops folk) own narrow focus of open source. When someone talks about open source having won, they're referring to how their company has three dozen services published on GitHub that can somehow be strung together to approximate 60% of what their company is actually putting in people's hands at the end of the day. That's open source for you.
Stallman and his acolytes had it right all along about focusing on free software as a philosophy meant to empower users and not career programmers (who already generally make more than the average household...). It doesn't matter if a smattering of SaaSsy services are open source if (a) it's mired in the sort of headaches that are par for the course in devops today with respect to actually being able to run the thing, and (b) the app that real, actually people are jabbing with their fingers and literally touching is still proprietary.
So it's not a problem of too much open source; it's a problem of not enough, and a problem of eschewing with the user-focused underpinnings of free software along the way, to instead follow the career devopser's AWS/GitHub/whatever-powered path while advertising it as win. To borrow liberally from Alan Kay, the computing revolution hasn't been won—because it has not yet even happened.
Corporations does not care about much but shareholders' interests. If you want to change that, you need to come up with a different system than capitalism, which encourages the standards you want to see.
Changing incentives, standards and cultural norms absolutely is possible within a capitalist system. In fact, it's required. Otherwise, capitalist economies quickly descend into oligarchies with skewed markets that favor those with all the capital.
If profit were the only motive without any other rules in play, that wouldn't be capitalism at all. We need interventions in order to preserve a healthy system. To suggest otherwise is to defend an ideology that isn't capitalism itself.
For me this never ending OSS disagreement is just an excuse to take just benefits of the community but with zero retribution (there is no progress on that).
Someday, people will understand that Software is crafted by humans but not by a bunch of companies or self-thought computers.
If you don't want it, simply say so! But if you say you don't care... don't complain when people do.
Meanwhile, the open source code I write for my employer is Apache 2.0 licensed because the permissive licenses seem to be the most friendly towards large corporations and hence is what they prefer.
I've never found this square.
What is the alternative? Develop everything yourself in-house? That's not just expensive, it's dumb, because you'll get worse/less reliable software in general.
If it were the case that AWS broke some unspoken social convention that is hard to legally enforce, I'd be more sympathetic. But it feels more like the author made a choice to license their software using Apache 2 over other licenses.
It looks like Matt Asay, the lead for the open source and marketing team at AWS, has already reached out and said he's looking into it (and thanked Tim for the contribution).
I think there's generally a cultural norm to recognize an individual's contributions in general, especially when freely given.
If the comments on here largely echoed that sentiment and demonstrated that it was a cultural norm, expect AWS (and others) to be more likely to adhere to it in the future — it costs almost nothing, but there's definitely a value in having a positive reputation.
We do have the capacity as a community to define and uphold such cultural norms. Laws and licenses are not as binary as code.
If someone doesn't thank you for your "free" services, then keep your head down, plow ahead and take comfort in knowing you're doing a good enough job for a company like Amazon to use your stuff. And if that's not enough, send them a private message and let them know how you feel.
Given that everyone thinks like me, I wonder if some of the "Your license didn't say they couldn't." comments might be a defensive reaction to what they see as an unjustified public shaming. Like an unjustified honk on the road. This is twitter at its best right? Someone says something that pushes the right buttons (intentionally or not), people kick it up a notch by reacting defensively and we're off to the races!
You may wish to read https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/open-source-misses-the-point .
Copyright licence is a legally binding document. You can talk about the community all you like, but the legal system doesn't give a damn.
Sticking your head in the sand won't make the problem go away.