Amazon and Open Source: A Wee Bit Sensitive

January 31, 2020

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is one of the nation’s leading cloud computing services and its dominance increases every day. Computer Weekly commented on how AWS might be taking advantage of open source technology in the article, “AWS Hits Back At Open Source Theft Allegations.” Throughout 2019, AWS undermined open source software companies by “stealing” the free version of their software, then hosting it on their cloud computing service.

The actuations were so bad that The New York Times picked up the story and stated that in 2015 AWS integrated Elasticsearch from Elastic into their offerings, now Elastic and AWS are now rivals for customers. MongoDB and Redis have had to alter their open source software and licensed software so their customers know the difference. For example, the free version of MongoDB is integrated into AWS, but the licensed version is not, so it lacks certain features.

AWS responded with:

“In October 2018, Eliot Horowitz, chief technology officer and founder of MongoDB, changed the open source licensing used for MongoDB to reflect the risk of the company’s service revenue being gobbled up by public cloud providers. In response, AWS introduced a MongoDB-compatible service, DocumentDB, in January 2019.”

While open source technology is free, developers behind such offerings usually offer a licensed version with more bells and whistles. These include customer support, free upgrades, patches, and specific features.

AWS is strip mining the open source technology’s source code, then reconfiguring it their services. AWS Vice President of Analytics and ElastiCache states that AWS is only responding to their clients’ demands and their clients want open source software in AWS. He also said that AWS does give back to the open source community:

“AWS contributes mightily to open source projects such as Linux, Java, Kubernetes, Xen, KVM, Chromium, Robot Operating System, Apache Lucene, Redis, s2n, FreeRTOS, AWS Amplify, Apache MXNet, AWS SageMaker NEO, Firecracker, the OpenJDK with Corretto, Elasticsearch, and Open Distro for Elasticsearch. AWS has not copied anybody’s software or services.”

Many of the projects aim to make it easier for developers to build on top of AWS services. SageMaker is its machine learning cloud service; Greengrass extends the AWS cloud to the internet of things (IoT) edge and Firecracker is its kernel virtual machine. However, the s2n project is an open source implementation of the TLS encryption protocol, which AWS made publicly available under the terms of the Apache Software License 2.0.”

While AWS might be a singular provider for multiple services and products, organizations do not want to be locked into one supplier.

Whitney Grace, January 31, 2020

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