Open Source Weaponized: Can Amazon Dent the Future of Target and Walmart?
March 16, 2020
“Amazon Courts Walmart, Target to Join Cashierless Tech Group” is interesting but cut loose from the type of footnotes, named sources, and back up data some find helpful. Plus the WSJ states: “Retailers don’t yet plan to participate, but talks highlight Amazon’s ambition to have others adopt its technology.” If accurate, this is a page from the Amazon policeware / blockchain playbook. (For a free summary of DarkCyber’s Amazon policeware report, fill in the request form at this link.)
Retailers don’t yet plan to participate, but talks highlight Amazon’s ambition to have others adopt its technology
Amazon’s online bookstore bulldozer is revving through supply chain and demand mud. Despite the overheating of the big diesel engine, the S-Team is not resting on its laurels.
According to the Murdoch-inspired newspaper, “sources” have revealed “Amazon is making some of the software that underpins its Go stores available through an organization called Dent.” The idea seems to be that some of the technology would be open source.
DarkCyber finds the sourceless news interesting. Let’s assume that the write up is 100 percent accurate. Why give away a technology that could make Amazon’s AWS system some money? How open source is the Bezos bulldozer? What bits and pieces of digital connective tissue will be needed to make the open source technology work?
There are no answers to these questions. DarkCyber has formulated some other questions, and these also cannot be answered in a definitive way. Let’s look at these:
- Is Amazon use of open source a weaponization of the core ideas of open source software?
- How will the open source community respond to Amazon’s alleged embrace of open source?
- What type of pressure will Amazon’s open source play, if it indeed an accurate characterization of the WSJ sources’ factoids is accurate, put on its competitors?
- What does Amazon gain by making Target and Walmart look like outfits who don’t want to ride the Bezos bulldozer?
Net net: If the WSJ story is accurate, DarkCyber will have to reassess Amazon’s willingness to use certain types of digital data as a weapon. Like many weapons, caution is usually prudent. Mishandling can make downstream events in a chain quite interesting. Just Walk Out may garner a new connotation.
Stephen E Arnold, March 16, 2020
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