His conclusion reveals the intentions pretty clearly.<p>> Google Cloud’s recent Open Source partnerships are interesting. I look at that list of companies and it’s not obvious to me that they’re going to offer better operational excellence than Google’s, but maybe I’m wrong. It’s an interesting and probably useful experiment.<p>This is true spirit of Amazon i.e partners are competition to be killed.<p>> At the end of the day I’m not that worried. Most of us who’ve open-sourced stuff love the creative process for its own sake; touching and improving other engineers’ lives. The skillset evidenced by having done so will probably help you get really good jobs.<p>Wow I am just amazed at the callousness of this suggestion. So he wants developers to create good software out of love and free of cost and then toil for his company while he mint the customers. At least he is transparent about his intentions.
I have a lot of respect for the AWS team, but...<p>> one insanely-complex routine task that we do all the time is hiring. You know what the LPs are at hiring time? A checklist. Now even the typical all-day interview marathon isn’t gonna reliably dig into every LP, but we do an acceptable job of taking a close look at enough of them. I believe that’s very helpful in bringing down the asshole ratio.<p>In my personal and second degree experience with Amazon and AWS hiring, the application of the LPs by interviewers doesn't work nearly as well as most of them seem to think, and it often devolves into a mostly arbitrary hazing ritual. I'm willing to believe that AWS has fewer assholes, and that you can't excel at operations while an asshole, but I've seen too many bar raisers who acted as arrogant know-it-alls and made completely capricious, arbitrary and damaging decisions.
What an incredibly self serving glimpse into the the mind of a member of the empire du jour.<p>I'm sure Microsoft engineers felt similarly about democratizing computation in the 90s. Then the quote would have been "People just want point and click ease... They don't care about who their software dollars go to".<p>And yea. That's right. People don't vote fairly with their dollars. That's where regulators come in to ensure a level playing field.<p>"Embrace, extend, extinguish". Never forget. We've seen this show before.
This strikes me as a bit of a straw man -- "AWS has operational skill. Open source companies with managed service offerings of their software probably do not." The operational skills that AWS has are primarily at the infrastructure layer. If my experience with their managed software services and the tons of complaints in their support forums are any indication, their operational excellence drops off dramatically at the software layer. I don't fault AWS for trying to move up the value chain, but bashing on open source companies as "not a viable business model" distracts from the real question of who can delivery a better managed software offering on top of AWS's (or GCP's or Azure's) managed hardware platform.
So AWS, if your chief advantage is your operations, then why not open source both improvements you make to third party open source products and your own products? It seems like it wouldn't help your competitors that much since they don't have your operational expertise, and it would help your customers a lot, since they could have a better understanding of how the products work, and even make contributions to fix bugs that effect them, instead of waiting for the amazon team to make it down the backlog.<p>I get not wanting to pay for the open source software you use. I don't get why so little code is contributed back upstream.
Point taken -- AWS is better at ops than the developers who create open source tools.<p>Then why not pay a fraction of the money you're earning on offering these tools back to the open source community? Using something like GitHub's new funding tools?
That's an interesting story re: early twitter. Are you certain a MySQL SLA-level support contract would have solved their scalability issues? My understanding is that it was high volume of highly followed participants that led to congestion. I.e. a design problem. Eventually solved by caching and fanning out replicated tweet data to all followers.<p>To see the issues around cloud and open source right now, you only have to look at who's winning: enterprise consultants such as Dell EMC, HPe, Accenture, IBM, etc.<p>They are the ones pushing broad K8S adoption at the edge. And in the next generation it will probably come down to a new crop of ISVs to solve issues around data portability, vendor lock-in, security, pricing arbitrage, and training.
I give AWS employees the benefit of innovation eg. inventing "the cloud" as we know it today, but what's in there for developers? What are the incentives for F/OSS software developers if all they contribute to is monopolization, lock-in, and attention economy? tbray wants to appeal to an F/OSS ethos that has run its course and just doesn't make sense in the cloud economy. I'd go further and say F/OSS has ruined the software industry in that it has made software a commodity, so the only way to make a living is by operations, taking away economic value from developers, and giving it to cloud providers instead. That's obviously not a sustainable model for software development going forward, and creates incentives that are neither aligned with those of developers nor customers.<p>Well, AWS at least offers the marketplace for indie developers to offer their images (with a markup for billing which is ok I guess). If AWS is serious about a sustainable economic model for software developers, then they could start to expand this offering and make it more prominent (I haven't heard much about it in a long while), building it on mainstream Linux distros rather than AWS Linux, etc. What I'm seeing on AWS marketplace and places such as DockerHub, though, are mostly repackaged F/OSS convenience builds rather than original applications. And AWS could have made a stance here by selling eg. Mongo DB images from the marketplace rather than going for Mongo's customers with their own offering. I guess it's better than on Azure and Google Cloud at least, where you need a partnership deal to even be able to sell images.
what's the point of this? open source is not a business model, or it's not relevant, or you shouldn't expect it to be a career... or something? does it matter perhaps that AWS and most every other cloud company is running most of what they have on Linux which is...um, open source? I was not able to follow what point this article was trying to make. something about if you're not a nice person you can't do ops....OK ? being a nice person is generally helpful in a lot of ways, right?
You know what I like about Amazon? I'm a <i>customer<i>. I pay my money (not much) and you give me what I want (enough for me). I deal with Google and lots of other Big Tech companies too, but I never forget that I'm not the customer there. "The TV business is like the chicken business: the chickens think that because they get fed, they're the customers."
New business model idea: write open source software with a license that requires, well, a license to _operate_. It's free in all the typical APL2 senses, except that you can't sell it "as a service" without signing, effectively, a "lease." Now, supposing the project gains sufficient popularity / community / traction, all you have to do is wait for Amazon to take note of the project and contact you for a lease. You ask for 30% and retire. And if they invent a competing project that is at all API-compatible, they have to prove in court that they haven't plagiarized any of your open source code; but, that wouldn't happen anyway, since by their own admission, they're not focused on writing software, they're focused on operating it.<p>Someone with experience/knowledge in this area tell me if I'm off my rocker. I know it sounds too simple. But why wouldn't this work?
You've got to be kidding, for 99% of the projects out there a dedicated server will have the same uptime as an EC2 VM, for a tenth of the price, and unlimited bandwidth. AWS is a plain ripoff and any field expert with a bit of critical thinking would not fall in the trap for long.
I use and contribute to open source, and I know I can't compete with Amazon in terms of operational excellence, and that operations is where the value lies in this unregulated cluster-fuck of douchebaggery that is the modern software world. I'm already very aware, Tim, that if I make something useful, and I open source it and try to make a business out of it, some asshole like you will come along and deploy it at scale and market the hell out of it and tell me I'm cute for even trying, and that you just might throw an Amazon job my way if I'm lucky. This kind of arrogance makes me think twice about contributing to open source, and it makes me hope your arrogance runs up against something intractable, and soon.