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).
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.
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.
> 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 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.
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’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.
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".
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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)
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.
>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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
...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.
