Amazon Web Services

Monday's New York Times has an article on Amazon Web Services (AWS), its ubiquity, and its effect on software providers. It writes of Amazon in the tone which twenty years ago people wrote of Microsoft. I did not see "embrace, extend, extinguish" in the article, but maybe I didn't look closely enough.

Amazon has identified a soft point in "open source" software: it is in general freely available for anyone's use, it is in principle freely available to be modified and extended; but this can mean that the advantage goes to the user with the most hardware, and the one with the most money to fund the adaptation and enhancement of existing products. These days, Amazon might well have the most hardware and the most money. Those who developed MariaDB, MongoDB, and Redis get a smaller share of the revenue generated from their work than Amazon does.

Yet for one who has followed this for some years, there are omissions in the picture. IBM has run Linux virtual machines (VMs) on its mainframes for many years, and has recently purchased Red Hat, which makes one of the most popular Linux distributions. During the years before the purchase, did Red Hat or IBM make the most money from this? Nor are IBM and Amazon the only companies that have made money off Linux: Google, Oracle, Facebook, and these days Microsoft run a lot of Linux. Does anyone consider any of these corporations more benevolent than Amazon?

Google based its Android operating system on Linux. If you set up an application on the Google Cloud Platform and need a database, one of the options you will have is MySQL, from which MariaDB is derived. (To be sure, at the moment the entities most scared of Google in the cloud world are its customers, who believe that it has considered abandoning GCP and could do so if it can't outdo AWS.)

I find Amazon's tactics troubling, and not only in cloud computing. Still, I thought the article could have used some nuance.