The Commons Clause really isn't as important as we think it is [LWN.net]

The Commons Clause really isn't as important as we think it is

Posted Aug 23, 2018 22:18 UTC (Thu) by nilsmeyer (guest, #122604)
In reply to: The Commons Clause really isn't as important as we think it is by bkuhn
Parent article: Redis modules and the Commons Clause

I think the issue of the dangerous nature of the Cloud oligopoly is worthy of attention. Especially Amazon is a pitiful example of corporate citizenship, not only are their contributions mostly limited to supporting their NIH infrastructure (like elastic network adapters), they also tend to abuse their employees and try anything not to pay taxes. Endangering free software is just another addition to the list...

Ironically, most of the hosted, managed services perform worse than building something on the basis of virtual machines alone.

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The Commons Clause really isn't as important as we think it is

Posted Aug 23, 2018 22:38 UTC (Thu) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link] (3 responses)

As an Amazon employee who worked a fair bit with the ENA source code, what are the non-NIH-ed alternatives to it?

I'm seriously interested.

The Commons Clause really isn't as important as we think it is

Posted Aug 23, 2018 22:40 UTC (Thu) by nilsmeyer (guest, #122604) [Link]

It's just an example of a contribution that only benefits Amazon - sorry for not making this clear. Or is it possible to buy a device compatible with the driver?

AWS NIH

Posted Aug 25, 2018 5:26 UTC (Sat) by wmf (guest, #33791) [Link] (1 responses)

Mellanox and Chelsio NICs have very similar functionality to the ENA, although I can imagine several legitimate reasons why AWS might have chosen to develop their own NIC.

AWS NIH

Posted Aug 25, 2018 7:25 UTC (Sat) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link]

> Mellanox and Chelsio NICs have very similar functionality to the ENA, although I can imagine several legitimate reasons why AWS might have chosen to develop their own NIC.
ENAs have a lot of "secret sauce" inside. But to be fair, lots of larger instances just use a regular Intel network card using PCI pass-through.