7 ms·

Looks like pretty good news. Have worked in AWS before. So AWS is very famous for making money using open source products without contributing upstream. One ve

• deepsun 5y ago
  Sometimes fixing upstream is hard / not possible, when maintainers don't want to accept others' proposals/vision, or are cautious to change architecture with breaking changes.
  • DelightOne 5y ago
    So they don't release the result as OSS because upstream wouldn't have included it?
  • pjgalbraith 5y ago
    I don't know much about this particular case. However generally speaking that is not true. They would just need to make the fork public. Whether the maintainer accepted the changes upstream is irrelevant.
  • heavyset_go 5y ago
    Unless they actually tried to upstream it, this point doesn't really matter. From what I can see, they never actually tried or intended to upstream their changes, so this is irrelevant. They didn't even release the fork's source, let alone try to upstream it.
• theamk 5y ago
  So.. Redis had a choice of licenses: BSD (improvements do not need to be contrbuted back) or GPL (improvements do need to be contributed back). For whatever reason they chose BSD. And now Amazon made some improvements and is not contributing back. Not sure why anyone is surprised.
  • heavyset_go 5y ago
    GPL wouldn't prevent Amazon from forking and then providing managed instances of the project without releasing the source code of the fork. AGPL would, though. But yes, this is the reason I won't work for free on my own or others' BSD or MIT licensed projects.
  • ignoramous 5y ago
    BSD and MIT don't grant patent rights; this might be one reason Facebook uses them, though they did try to get predatory in the only way Facebook can: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14779881 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14779881 ianal, but imo, Apache License v2, Mozilla Public License v2, and xGPLs v3 are better at protecting the rights of the consumers (including contributors).
• rabuse 5y ago
  Ahh, the new Oracle.
  • ignoramous 5y ago
    At this point in AWS' life, enterprise sales is king. Not surprising that there's shades of Oracle / Microsoft in them. May be, Google hired Oracle #2, Thomas Kurian, to head GCP for similar reasons. Like it or not, Oracle-sized shadow looms large over BigCloud.
    • LoveGracePeace 5y ago
      It surprises me when people lump Oracle (or AWS for that matter) in with the likes of Microsoft.
      • ghaff 5y ago
        Why? They're all enterprise software companies. They participate in open source to greater or lesser degrees. They seem absolutely part of the same category. This isn't either positive or negative commentary but just observation of what they do as businesses.
      • ipaddr 5y ago
        You are right Microsoft could be a more difficult entity to deal with.
      • nextaccountic 5y ago
        The process to make MS-OOXML an ISO standard was a dirty one https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standardization_of_Office_Open_XML https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standardization_of_Office_Open... and 2008 wasn't that long ago
        • dafelst 5y ago
          Ballmer era Microsoft is a very different beast to Nadella era Microsoft
• csdreamer7 5y ago
  A side question: is there anything licensed AGPL that AWS uses? Either AWS releases the code or found a way around the license?
  • zeckalpha 5y ago
    Yes, but AFAIK it isn’t modified.
• rubiquity 5y ago
  Disclaimer: ex-AWS as well, worked very closely with MemoryDB, but not paid to shill! You're entitled to your opinion but your line of reasoning for how MemoryDB for Redis came to exist or the reasoning about why it isn't in upstream Redis is not factual. MemoryDB's architecture uses Amazon's home grown log replication services as pointed out by Werner Vogel in his blog post about MemoryDB[0]. This architecture is fundamentally incompatible with upstream Redis. The real reason why MemoryDB for Redis exists is far less juicy: MemoryDB came about by meeting customers where they were. Customer's love Redis, especially for its non-caching features, but replication is a headache with all the existing solutions today. Also as far as I know one of the lead committers to Redis is from AWS. 0 - https://www.allthingsdistributed.com/2021/11/amazon-memorydb-for-redis-speed-consistency.html https://www.allthingsdistributed.com/2021/11/amazon-memorydb...
  • jacquesm 5y ago
    Incompatible or not isn't the point. Not releasing is what it's about. And yes, they can. But that doesn't make it right.
    • dottedmag 5y ago
      What's the point of releasing a chunk of code that relies on internal AWS infra?
      • awill88 5y ago
        I think it’s the fact that the implementation details don’t change the optics; AWS had the resources and talent to both monetize AND be a Good Samaritan by contributing to the upstream. The contributions could have been RFCs, GitHub issues, etc. With that said, I can imagine the rumored culture of AWS engineering doesn’t support wondering souls that typically nurture thoughts of community service for the upstream.
        • _msw_ 5y ago
          Disclosure: I work for AWS. There were contributions sent upstream for Elasticsearch bugfixes and enhancements. Some of those PRs are still open, for example [1]. A sampling of additional PRs can be found in this blog post [2]. Further contributions upstream to Apache Lucene have been growing over the years. The new Approximate Nearest Neighbor support in Elasticsearch 8.0 comes from work that was sponsored by Amazon in upstream Apache Lucene [3]. [1] https://github.com/elastic/elasticsearch/pull/64513 https://github.com/elastic/elasticsearch/pull/64513 [2] https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/opensource/stepping-up-for-a-truly-open-source-elasticsearch/ https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/opensource/stepping-up-for-a-tr... [3] https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/LUCENE-9004 https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/LUCENE-9004