Call me pessimistic, but I wonder how soon we will see blog post in the style "It was wonderful journey" that will announce AGPL v3 or other style of "shared source" license.
For a project like this I would say pretty unlikely because the API is already free for anyone to implement and competing implementations already exist.
The main difficulty with a system like this is the subtlety of operating it at scale with consistent performance and global availability.
The software itself only accounts for a small portion of that.
If AWS and friends were to pick this up and offer it then they would be putting in all of that work too so there would be a lot less they get for "free" comparatively (unless they offer an inferior product). i.e it's a substantially different situation from MongoDB, etc where the software is 99% of the product.
This is a pretty good analysis of the situation I think. The only thing that I would like to point out is that only a description of the API is available via the Zanzibar paper. We, and other clean-room implementations, have had to fill in the gaps around what the APIs actually look like. We've even made some of our own improvements such as resource lookup by subject[0] and a filter-based delete that mirrors the read API[1].
It might be free software but for many people it'd conflict in practice with the OSD definition.
If you like Free Software in a Stallman sense, sure, but in these cases we shouldn't kid ourselves that they're doing it for altruistic reasons at all.
The license must not place restrictions on other software that is distributed along with the licensed software. For example, the license must not insist that all other programs distributed on the same medium must be open-source software.
I don't see the conflict there, in theory or in practise.
AGPLv3 and other GPL variants do not “place restrictions on other software that is distributed along with [them]”, there is no requirement or expectation that “all other programs distributed on the same medium must be open-source”. They at most insist that derived works (software that uses part of the code, by inclusion or linking) are covered by the license.
Call me pessimistic, but I wonder how soon we will see blog post in the style "It was wonderful journey" that will announce AGPL v3 or other style of "shared source" license.