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0 pointscyanydeez1h ago0 comments

Walmart pulling up top a small town, opening a single business, paying everyone minimum wage is not 'competition is good'.

Just try a little bit of understanding.

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rpdillon1h ago

This feels close to "felony contempt of business model".

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/06/felony-contempt-busine...

We are supportive of 3rd party ink cartridges, and there's little concern for the business model of the printer manufacturers. We instead care about the rights of the folks using the printers.

With Postgres, no one bats an eye that there are thousands of hosting companies providing Postgres as an offering, and they give nothing back to the project. Same with Apache, Nextcloud, Linux, Nginx, Sqlite, and thousands of other pieces of open-source software. Are folks against hosting companies like https://yunohost.org/?

It's only when (1) the software is open-source, and (2) the entity behind it doesn't know how to sustain itself with open-source, that we suddenly change positions and view the project as a victim. This doesn't happen with printers, it doesn't happen with other open source software. I'm not even against a change in the license, but claiming that AWS is evil for doing this doesn't track.

gobdovan1h ago

A lot of those projects are not companies selling software. They're effectively public infrastructure projects, often governed by non-profit foundations or community institutions.

Also, many of them predate hyperscalers and developed governance/economic structures that make them harder for AWS to capture or destabilize, whereas AWS free-riding a vendor-controlled project can destroy the economic engine sustaining the project itself.

Quite ironically, the only example from your list that doesn't predate hyperscalers (Nextcloud) is fundamentally a self-hosting/federation product. It exists largely as an alternative to hyperscaler-native platforms, not as a cloud primitive AWS can easily commoditise into its own stack.

So, treating PostgreSQL, Linux, Elasticsearch and Nextcloud as interchangeable "open source projects" ignores the completely different institutional and economic realities behind the projects.

rpdillonnew24m ago

Indeed! I just don't think it's on Amazon to fix those institutional and economic realities when they decide to host a project that people find useful.

tonyedgecombe1h ago

Maybe it is for the consumer. When Aldi opened in my nearest town my food bill dropped by 20%.

gobdovan50m ago

That's the desired outcome of competition but the effects can go all over the place and the second-order effects in fragile towns can matter more than the price drop. As an extreme example, some people may lose their jobs, local spending may fall, some small shops may close and Aldi may pull out too, so everybody loses (here's [0] as an approximate example).

Usually a community can tolerate changes only when it's not already near the bottom. When you're near the bottom, almost any destabilisation can kill your little system.

[0] https://www.fox32chicago.com/news/aldi-closes-west-pullman-c...

surajrmal1h ago

Arguably the town is at fault for choosing to permit Walmart to open in their town in that analogy. If you want to control the negative externalities of capitalism you can't just expect to not provide regulations and hope things will work out.

Even if it weren't AWS, someone else with enough determination could use the same open source code to create a compelling alternative taking away business from the original authors. Trying to use social norms to make people not do that is not effective. You need mechanisms that can be enforced via legal procedures to be effective.

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