i think the branding "open source Amazon" is just way too ambitious/big. invites a lot of confusion/criticism if Amazon is different things to different people.
Another way to frame it (from the opposite direction) is a collective failure on "our" part (if there is such a thing as "us") to explore and promote genuinely interesting things just because they lack the sparkle of click bait on the outer surface.
Maybe it isn't that we "fall for" click bait, it's that we very loudly ignore stuff that isn't.
Either that we actively (doubtful) ignore non-click-bait, more that we are programmed (in some sense) to only pay attention to click-bait.
It is genuinely difficult to ignore things which sound alarming but usually either nonsense or much less alarming, than it is to actively investigate everything, whether it seems alarming or not.
The later is much more difficult but also a lot more fruitful - it is why Google News was so good, a simple collation of all news instead of only click-bait-y news, and why it is genuinely terrible now (mostly dominated by click-bait-y news again).
And again, an illustration of active versus passive - actively filtering google news feeds was fruitful, passively filtering led to algorithmic optimizations which ultimately favored high click counts and therefore more click-bait-y news...and ultimately at this point to being "click-bait highlights of the day", akin to some nonsense like yahoo or msn news.
An open source order management system is interesting to a certain number of people, but probably doesn't affect me personally. It sounds like another open web storefront builder if i had to guess based on the title.
An open source Amazon is a big deal, it implies that it aims to do what Amazon does, not just a repo you can clone and build an online store, and I might be placing orders there someday.
A distributed open source Amazon. Storing goods in people's rooms. Creating a distributed worldwide warehouse, kinda like P2P. With a fleet of uber-like delivery persons. Each participant gets a share of the profits.
I think we get excited by big ideas, and things that sound like big ideas. That makes us a great sounding board. On another forums it'd be 'i like amazon, down vote' or 'i don't need that, ignore'.
At least here, we move on perceived merit, however superficial
Amazon’s primary source of revenue is as a market-maker/logisticics provider, so why not position yourself as a competitor if it gets contributors interested?
Amazon to most is primarily a website where you get everything mostly reliable and mostly with a consumer focussed service (I for one never had any issues when returning things, any problem was like "yeah ok, send it back, we send you a new one or do you want a refund?" ... For sellers they play a different game with their market power, discounts or they won't offer your things or rank competitors higher)
Nobody ever wants to open source Pornhub. Wide consumer interest, no physical products to worry about, lots of advertising potential - and your not competing with Amazon, Wal-Mart, Google, Apple, or Target. Sounds like a better deal to me.
The payment processors will shut you down even for your first payment if it's for porn. More likely - you'll never get to a first payment anyways, they won't sign the contract.
> The payment processors will shut you down even for your first payment if it's for porn. More likely - you'll never get to a first payment anyways, they won't sign the contract.
If that was even occasionally true, the tons of paid porn sites wouldn't exist. The fact that they both exist and take popular cards tells me that that cannot possibly be true.
Many have already done open source Google and MS. We have those solutions already, and they are great though not yet pervasive. We need open source market place and logistics, and that is where they should stay focused.
Also very difficult to compete with Amazon. Amazon makes their operating profits from cloud computing and subsidizes their retail market with it. That is how they keep prices so low.
I would be down for an open source AWS services. Shouldn't be to hard to make web front end to the fire cracker instance, but make everything in the backend open source, so any one can run the community edition.
The Amazon comparison clearly helped to get on the HN front page.
> Show HN: I'm building an open-source order management system and marketplace API
https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=openship.org