Moore’s Scofflaws

Years ago, Jeff Bezos famously quipped that “your margin is my opportunity.” This was of course aimed not at Amazon’s customers, but rather its competitors, and it was deadly serious: customers of AWS in those bygone years will fondly remember that every re:Invent brought with it another round of price cuts. This era did not…

Moore’s Scofflaws

Bryan Cantrell doing the work of pointing out what it is actually that “clouds” do here. Per core licensing for apps, services and all the like. What’s the point in that other than rent seeking B.S, especially if there’s no real competition in the market where your software competes. Lastly and this is truly the best pullquote EVAR:

Oxide: when you buy the Oxide cloud computer, all of the software to run it is included. This includes all of the software necessary to run the rack as elastic infrastructure: virtual compute, virtual storage, virtual networking. (And yes, it’s all open source — which unfortunately demands the immediate clarification that it’s actually open source rather than pretend open source.)

https://oxide.computer/blog/moores-scofflaws

Pretend open source,… so let click that link for you if you’re too busy/lazy to try seeing where this goes. Jay Kreps is the owner of a company named Confluent. They support, develop software as a service known as Apache Kafka. Kafka was a technology created at Linked in for handling “streaming data”, the kind of little messages en masse that a service like LinkedIn uses to handle posts, update to posts, and allow people to “Like” posts at scale. But LinkedIn decided to spin it out as a technology, open source it and let others benefit.

But now Confluent (Jay Krep’s company) offers Kafka to subscribers that want to use it, but not host it. The “license” terms that Confluent wrote up to accompany their product indicates you don’t own the software, you are merely being allowed to use it at the discretion of the real owner (Confluent). So while Apache Kafka is open source, and Confluent offers it to subscribers, that’s the sum total of open source-y-ness (to borrow the Steven Colbert metaphor). There’s no kimono being opened, just a kimono with the words “Open Source” printed on the outside of it. One can subscribe to Confluent, but having done so, cannot “compete” with Confluent using Confluent’s intellectual property (Apache Kafka and any of gimcracks, gewgaws, and jetsam and flotsam Confluent has added to make bits of it ‘proprietary’). So buyer beware if you are trying to develop a software project on someone else’s cloud platform. You may be in for a fight.