AWS and Azure are services, not libraries; Elasticsearch is mostly open source; and DynamoDB, well, how many people use it again?
AWS and Azure are services
A lot of people seem really confused by this, based on the number of downvotes.
Amazon Web Services
I don’t think people know what AWS means, it’s literally in the name.
They also keep thinking I’m talking about the services they provide, and not, you know the actual fucking servers those services run on. Surprise, the servers themselves also need an operating system and the “server” you create is a Virtual Machine that lives on their actual, physical server and its OS.
Every day I learn more about how people don’t actually understand how the internet works.
Elasticsearch is also more rare then people realize.
AWS is closed source in some areas because they have not released the software they use to manage their platform. In other areas they have released the source code. It’s actually a pain in the ass that tools like LocalStack have evolved to fix.
Am I missing something or do two cloud computing services, two database systems, and a search engine have nothing to do with a game engine? Cuz this looks like a false equivalency whataboutism two-for-one combo to me.
It’s a random list for sure, but vendor lock-in can also be a problem for companies hosting their stuff in the cloud in a similar manner to what’s happening with unity.
I suppose that’s true, but then the question becomes: how many people proselytizing Godot/OSS use these services personally vs in a corporate environment where they may not have a choice? Because I’m not sure the supposed hypocrisy the meme is “joking” about actually exists.
Fallacious arguments? In the comments of my content aggregation website? I don’t believe it for a second.
well sure, but dog houses aren’t made out of waffles, anyways.
This meme is stupid. FOSS versions of all that crap also exist.
Yeah but are you using it or are you using the closed source options?
No, I have never used any of those closed source options. I wanted cloud services I have perfectly good esp32 lying around. And if I get worried about the vendor provided system libraries I can just buy a Raspberry Pi or something.
Who cares? You act annoying just like Foss fan boys.
Out of that list, I like MongoDB. I just did bits in SQL before I started using it for the little python tools I’ve made for stuff.
Services aren’t source code lol
But you can’t see the code that runs those services, stores your settings, deploys your code, etc. Services are still a liability if they go away and your project depends on it
They’re a completely different liability.
While you are right about it being an issue, it is very different to rent a Vroot server and having to move the server and moving your game from engine to engine.
And I wouldn’t give shit to unity devs for choosing unity. I just don’t think hosts and engines are equal.
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OP…buddy…you okay? Did you hit your head or something?
Oh no the internet runs on computers that use “Closed Source Software” to manage the packets that flow through them! This means that if I have a website that is open source, I’m actually a hypocrite? Actually I’m not sure what the point of this comic is.
Yes? What does that have to do with unity or godot?
Did Mongodb change something? I’ve been using the community edition for a good long time.
Their license, the SSPL, is actually pretty fucking far from open. That being said for anyone not a platform provider it’s basically open source so you can consider it as such. You just have to deal with SSPL callouts when you do compliance reviews.
Edit: the meme says “closed source” which is patently false for Mongo
Edit: the meme says “closed source” which is patently false for Mongo
No, MongoDB is closed source, proprietary software. You might be confusing open source with source available.Edit: Actually I am wrong sorry. Closed source is not the opposite of open source. I didn’t read your comment exactly enough. MongoDB is not open source, it’s not free software, it is source available and thus not closed source. The things below are still true but don’t contradict what you said.
The SSPL is not a free software license and it is not an open source license. The OSI said so:
https://blog.opensource.org/the-sspl-is-not-an-open-source-license/
It’s to the AGPL what the GPL is to LGPL: More viral. Calling it “not open source” when using it would require the likes of Amazon to open up their complete stack is kinda hare-brained.
It could reasonably be argued that it’s too viral and gods know people have been doing that with the GPL but OSI’s argument “enforces additional usage restrictions” is… well, then any copyleft is a usage restriction if you want to be consistent.
That’s why I started by saying it’s pretty far from open. I refuse to touch SSPL projects at work because they’re not open. You have rights until you want to sell something the licensor might misconstrue as theirs. Terraform’s BSL is a new iteration of this bullshit.
It used to be AGPL, now it’s SSPL.
The one thing you can count on Godot users for is that they act exactly like Arch Linux users.
I think that’s because the software comes from a similar place. You have to fight for your freedom and it takes effort, and the people that put that effort in like to feel good about it by sharing (or showing off). It’s like gym-goers who like to show their hard-earned progress.
And then there’s the fundamental differences in core philosophy, where a lot of friction between open and closed source projects comes in. It’s warranted, but I get why it’s annoying.
The vegans of the software world.
PS, I run Arch.
Look, I might have switched to Godot if all the people recommending it weren’t so annoying about it. Effort or not, the vast majority of those people did not contribute to the software, so it wasn’t even their fight. They just adopted a weird oppression fetish into their personality and decided to make FOSS into their god.
If someone was wronged by “Big GameDev” or whatever and developed their own FOSS replacement, then good on them, I am happy to listen about it. But the large majority of these users didn’t do that, but act like they did. Just be normal, please. Being so overly annoying about it isn’t going to attract more people, existing users being annoying are going to push away potential new users.
You’re just as annoying as the people preaching Godot. Surely you see that.
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Just someone didn’t develop something dosen’t mean they can’t passionately share it. If you like a TV show and started talking about how much you like the show it wouldn’t rude for you to share just because you weren’t the director of the show.
People are free to continue using proprietary software, but you can’t then continue to complain when they inevitably do another shitty thing in the name of profit.
No wonder people are promoting FOSS, what else do you want to happen? I really don’t get why people are so hostile to FOSS, it’s literally for your own long-term benefit. How many more projects have to enshittify before people get it?
I am not complaining about FOSS, or even saying its bad. I am saying the people that look at FOSS as if it was their god are annoying. The people that just cannot shut up and have to shove it in your face. The people that start conversations with “I use Arch” or “Godot is the best.” Thats what I am talking about.
People are passionate about FOSS, that is not a bad thing. What is your excuse for complaining about other peoples way of expressing their passion? Is that your passion, to spread a little more negativity in the world?
„Kink-shaming is my kink“
That’s why you don’t make your systems dependent on any of those tools. If Mongo goes crazy, you add an implementation to another document database, test to see if performance is good enough, and start to migrate to another database.
There’s no problem in using proprietary shit. The problem is marrying stuff you can’t rely on, building your house on land you don’t own.
That’s also one of the reasons why it isn’t good to use very unique features from any service, because once you start relying on it, you get locked, AWS may have a billion services, i would normally only use those that other providers also have.
Yup, wrappers for everything you didn’t build yourself. That way when you inevitably have to switch vendors, you can simply write a new wrapper using the same interface, minimal changes necessary
Except AWS runs on Linux…
So does the unity engine and that doesn’t make it any less closed source.
That’s not what I meant by “runs on Linux.” I mean the software that makes AWS servers function, behind the scenes, is Linux. You’re allowed to install whatever you want on a server if you rent a server from AWS, but the software that allows you to rent a server from them and lets you set up your own server is… Linux.
AWS servers run on an operating system that is a CentOS/RHEL flavor of Linux that has been heavily modified by Amazon for their use-case.
The vendor lock in from AWS doesn’t come from just using EC2 servers. EC2 is just linux servers, like you say. You could run them anywhere. In fact, if you’re just running AWS EC2 servers without leveraging their other features, particularly auto-scaling, you’re probably just setting money on fire. Everything EC2 offers can be done much cheaper at a different host.
The AWS lock-in comes when you expand to their other services. Route 53 DNS, Relational Database Service, Simple Email Service, etc etc. AWS offers a ton of different services that are quite useful, and they add new ones all the time. And if your company uses a bunch of them, and then realizes they need to leave AWS, doing so is incredibly painful. Which is the point.
If you hard code their services into your product, sure. But you should be abstracting away from that. Then it’s just writing new plugins instead of redesigning everything.
Abstracting away is costly. You can target only the lowest common denominator. The abstractions are going to leak. It’s like the criticism of ORMs, only worse since SQL is at least standardized.
Vendor lock-in from a service provider is different from vendor lock-in from using proprietary software.
If you’re dumb enough to not host your shit locally and instead rely on Amazon, that’s literally your own shortsightedness that led to vendor lock in.
The first mistake anyone made was thinking putting their whole business on some other businesses private property was a good idea. Pro-tip: it’s not.
In other words, I already agree with you, but I think vendor lock-in for services is a vaslty different issue than vendor lock-in for proprietary software.
My point is that, if someone really leverages the power of AWS, it is entwined into their software stack to such an extent that it is not just a service anymore. It’s a platform. It’s the glue that keeps everything together. The lines between service and proprietary software blur real quick. It’s one of the reasons for the AGPL.
Everything in development involves risk, and products will move real slow if you don’t depend on someone for some services. But developers aren’t very good at risk management, not being reliant on a single service to butter your bread. It is very quick to bring a minimum value product to market on AWS, but the followup to that MVP needs to be moving to a more sustainable, less risky infrastructure.
All right, I agree with that take. However, I would also argue that those are choice you can make when using AWS, and while Amazon surely pushes those solutions through ads and whatnot, it’s still a choice that people can make. Yes, after they’ve made that choice, they’re fucked out of luck if they want to switch to a different service, but that’s why (in my opinion) “the cloud” was always a lie that was meant to benefit large corporations. It reduced IT overhead for small companies, but it did it, like you point out, at the expense of getting locked into the vendor-environment.
If they can’t see that in the future this will cause lock-in… once again, that’s their own shortsightedness and inability to consider the implications of using exclusively AWS servers and services.
If AWS decides tomorrow to pull a Unity, can you fork it and keep your business running? Or do you need to rebuild an entire deployment infrastructure?
If your cloud provider decides to screw you you’re gonna have to put physical infrastructure together no matter what license their software is distributed under.
Motherfuckers out here think data isn’t a physical object and that the cloud is actually a cloud.
No, god damn it, all data is stored in a medium, whether that’s a book, a Bluray disc, or a hard drive. It’s mediums for storing data. If you destroy the storage medium, the data ceases to exist. Thus, data is a physical object.
Data is reliant upon a physical storage medium, like helium (or other gas/water/pee) is reliant upon a balloon. Pop it, and it’s lost to the ether.
/Star Trek simile
Excellent addition. Star Trek similes are always welcomed.
o7
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And you complained about me being pedantic… lol
Data is not physical; it’s ephemeral. It requires a physical medium in/upon which to be contained.
Edit: and to answer your question: no. What’s in your head would be considered an idea, a thought, or a concept. Perhaps even a consideration, as you literally stated.
suppose you already own the servers, magically or something, could aou set them up to take lour aws workload? no, you have none of the software that aws uses that manages the whole thing. You can host your applications yourself, but you’re in for a big rewrite if you do.
Yes. Because I intentionally design systems to avoid vendor lock-in by, at the very least, including a plan to export data and keep IaC in a repo so that it can be used to redeploy at either another vendor or colo-based servers.
Here’s some good tools to do so:
- Foreman Self-managed Metal-as-a-Service/VM-as-a-Service orchestrator. It’s FOSS.
- Terraform Formerly FOSS, now moving to BSL due to service providers taking advantage of them. IaC tooling that allows one to rapidly deploy and manage infra on multiple platforms.
- Keycloak FOSS IAM platform that’s pretty straightforward to use.
- Talos Many choices here but I’ve used Talos before. It’s a FOSS K8S-specific Linux distro that is designed to be platform agnostic and auto-deployed with a simple config.
- Helm K8S deployment manager. Need a DB? You can probably find a chart.
There’s a ton of other possibilities but FOSS and source-availabile licensed software makes it pretty straightforward (though still time-consuming as no infra is fully cloud agnostic due to non-standardization between the big three in infra primitives).
so, how many clicks is that?
That wasn’t in the initial reqs. And, supposing the hardware was good to go, about the same as AWS.
ETA: The time/click savings is more likely to be in maintenance because using a cloud service is just paying someone else to do that for you.
Running your server on someone else’s hardware isn’t the same thing as using not using open source?
AWS’s servers themselves run on an Amazon-modified flavor of Linux. I’m pretty sure this version already is a fork of CentOS or RHEL.
If you choose to use AWS, you can choose a variety of Linux flavors to run.
If you choose to leave AWS and you have to find a new hosting provider or need to procure hardware to host it yourself, that has nothing to do with the provider being open source or not. Them forking their versions of Linux really only affects Amazon internally, they’re not giving their internally used version out to everyone for use. They have Amazon’s Linux 2 which they do give away to everyone to use, but why would you use it when there’s more open versions of Linux available?
Once again, this seems mostly like people confusing using open source software and using hardware that someone else owns. Open source isn’t about who owns the hardware, that’s a private property issue. That’s more akin to setting up your business on Amazon’s lawn and then getting frustrated when Amazon isn’t mowing their lawn and your business can’t be seen from the road. Honestly, that’s what you get for setting up shop on someone else’s property where they already have their own shop.
Except most people running their services on AWS are not using just the EC2 instances. I would even go as far as saying no one in their sane mind uses AWS just for EC2, at which point you are probably tied to the services you use. If Amazon goes full Unity, and you are lucky it’s things that have alternative implementations like S3, if it’s something like sagemaker you’re fucked.
Y’all are fundamentally talking about different things and are failing to see why they are different.
Vendor lock in from proprietary software is not the same thing as vendor lock in from using vendors hardware.
Both are bad, but they are not the same, and conflating the two is misunderstanding the point. Just like the original meme misunderstood the point.
You keep making the assumption that AWS == EC2, meanwhile it is just one of many services AWS provides.
I’m literally not talking about the services they provide, I’m talking about the AWS servers themselves. The physical box that lives at Amazon. To boot up it has to have an operating system. That OS is a flavor of Linux. The number of people who have not understood that in this thread is downright mind boggling.
Who cares what OS the AWS machines are running? I can’t touch it, it’s completely inaccessible for me and other clients. I can only touch the services which AWS provides. I wouldn’t know the difference if it was running windows, since the OS is completely transparent, basically a hidden implementation detail.
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MongoDB is under the Server Side Public License (SSPL) which is not an Open Source license.
Idc about open source purism personally. I’m okay with open source projects making it difficult for corporate users to make profit and contribute nothing back.
It’s open source enough for me. The code is open, contributions are accepted, forking is doable. That’s what matters.
As the OSI says in the post linked above:
This is not to say that Elastic, or any company, shouldn’t adopt whatever license is appropriate for its own business needs. That may be a proprietary license, whether closed source or with source available. […] What a company may not do is claim or imply that software under a license that has not been approved by the Open Source Initiative, much less a license that does not meet the Open Source Definition, is open source software. It’s deception, plain and simple, to claim that the software has all the benefits and promises of open source when it does not.
A lot of companies are trying to redefine what “open source” means. And regrettably, this is probably something that was inevitable with a name as open to interpretation as “open source”, but it’s unfortunate that the OSI was denied the trademark for the term. If they owned the trademark, nobody would believe projects like ElasticSearch and MongoDB are open source when they do not meet the Open Source Definition (OSD), because those companies wouldn’t be able to claim they are.
Open source was never about preventing people from making a profit. That sounds more like the original Linux license, where Linus Torvalds didn’t want money to change any hands in the process of conveying the software. I can’t imagine how much worse things would be if Linus never transitioned to a license that met the OSD. My belief is that there is nothing wrong with making money so long as the software meets the OSD. I know at least the GNU Project actively encourages people to sell free software.
Opensearch exists and is a fork of the last open source version of elasticsearch.
Upvote for the title alone.
If AWS was open source, you wouldn’t be protected from a similar incident. You’re primarily using them for servers and infrastructure.
