1. People put a lot of work into building databases. The license choice is OSS / FOSS.
2. Some people in the community (original authors, community leads) make a company around the database and continue developing it for years on end. They sometimes raise venture capital to expand the business.
3. Amazon / Google / Microsoft offer managed versions of the database and make bank on it. Easily millions in revenue. Original creator / company doesn't get anything, and the hyperscaler isn't obliged to pay.
4. The company decides to change the license to force Amazon / Google / Microsoft to pitch in and pay a fee.
5. Amazon / Google / Microsoft fork the database. The community revolts. Sometimes the people revolting are employees of the hyperscalers, other times these are just FOSS fans that hate "source available" licenses or relicensing.
6. Database company is forced to walk back the changes. Still no revenue.
---
The solution is clear: start your new database with an "equitable source / source available" license from day one. Nobody will complain about a relicense since your license will handle the hyperscalers right off the bat.
Basically your license needs one of a few things if you want to prevent Amazon from walking off with your money:
- A hyperscaler clause such that any managed offering has to (1) be fully open source, (2) has to pay a fee, or (3) is prevented outright.
- A MAU / ARR clause such that hyperscalers are in the blast radius. Note that this also hits your customers.
> The solution is clear: start your new database with an "equitable source / source available" license from day one. Nobody will complain about a relicense since your license will handle the hyperscalers right off the bat.
Yes, this would be the honest thing to do, but people don't do it because using a non-FOSS license loses you adoption. The step you're missing in your little timeline is that the only reason the project takes off at all and becomes big enough that anyone is making money off of it is because it's Open Source. Proprietary databases, programming languages, and similar have lost big time and that's not changing any time soon.
So what's really happening is that these FOSS companies want to have their cake and eat it too. They want to release code for free so that other devs will use it and then make money from the project while somehow banning other companies from also making money off it.
What's missing is why open source won. It's impossible to be rug pulled. If the maintainers (this is a carefully chosen word) attempt a rug-pull you can just Elastic or Redis them. If the product is closed this is impossible and you're at the mercy of whoever you built on. Open Source is the ultimate right to repair. Everything is working as intended.
Selling software is a deadend. Nobody in their right mind will pay for it because the risks are too great. If you want to build a technology business sell services and support.
The majority of software was always proprietary. GNU was a revolutionary idea. Businesses giving away their product to gain favor is just the natural tendency of the rate of profit to fall.
This purist mindset is killing the long term viability of open source. If hyperscalers can make money from successful projects but open source founders can't, in 10 years we'll have fewer open source projects.
Licence freedoms don't have to be all or nothing, or apply to everyone in the world. It can be open source and have restrictions. Anything else turns open source into a religion.
Not a religion, but a term with a specific meaning, which meaning implies a collection of freedoms granted without discrimination. People are welcome to use licenses that revoke those freedoms, but calling them FOSS is confusing and muddies the waters.
See Llama's license: if it can be Open Source while having restrictions, then having an Acceptable Use Policy is okay, right? So Redis could create a license that bans its use if you host adult content, Star Wars fan fiction, or documents containing the letter R?
If Open Source doesn't mean a license that indiscriminately grants a set of specific freedoms then it's pretty useless as a term—all I know on hearing it is that a project's source code is available. Which reminds me, we already have a term for that: Source Available.
Sort-of, we've had a litany of Postgres devshops go bust over the past decade. Some will be for the usual reasons but I wouldn't want to discount the impact of RDS.
However I think Postgres is a bit different. It's a bigger market and more widely used. There's a need for tuning services no matter which platform provides the database servers, so there's a level to make money above cloud hosting.
> So what's really happening is that these FOSS companies want to have their cake and eat it too.
talk about kicking down. So no harsh words about the big dogs who, while contributing nothing, and just due to sheer size and scale advantage, are capturing the lion's share of the enterprise value?
This is a line that gets thrown around very casually, but every assessment I've heard says that the big dogs are quite prolific contributors to these projects.
> capturing the lion's share of the enterprise value?
Ah, here's the Matt Mullenweg logic creeping in again [0]! This is basically his taunt towards DHH (though at least you're using it to cry foul rather than tease!): "although he has invented about half a trillion dollars worth of good ideas, most of the value has been captured by others."
And this is where I think most of this aggression towards cloud providers is actually coming from: a significant number of these companies have bought into the idea that they're a failure if they fail to capture the majority of the value from their Open Source project. Which is understandable when you make a VC-funded business out of it, but makes no sense given that FOSS has always been about advancing the collective good, not raking it in.
If your last sentence were true, you’d prefer a world where hyperscalers do not fork and close source a FOSS project but the FOSS project continues on to thrive
With copyleft being effectively banned in most companies, it means that there is no viable FOSS business model.
Reality is that for now, many FOSS contributors do it for free in their spare time. Comically critical pieces of infrastructure rely on such goodwill development.
But as cozy salaries decline and job security does, less people will have time to work for free.
We will have less Foss, less innovation, less new viable projects compared to if there were no hyperscalers.
ok sure, but there's contributing and contributing.
> a significant number of these companies have bought into the idea that they're a failure ...
ok, fair enough. But in that equilibrium you're painting, _only_ companies like AWS will ever be able to monetize open source, especially since software delivery and SAAS are essentially equivalent in 2025, and SAAS is a margin's play which small fry cannot compete with.
VC-funding is also the lever that allows for open source software to find deep and quick penetration in the industry. it's not aws driving it. So when a practitioner benefits from the mature tooling and such a wide userbase of say Redis or ElasticSearch, it is not only because it was cheap (open source), but also because it was lavishly supported (VC).
> I think most of this aggression towards cloud providers is actually coming from ...
I mean, you're certainly right about that, wouldn't call it aggression necessarily.
The software platform is different now than it was 20 years ago. If we want a thriving open source ecosystem, we will need a answer to the fact that big tech can hover up the spoils before the upstarts - that both spearhead the project _and_ fund its expansion - have a chance.
I don't think the license pick is because of adoption - outside of a few specific cases, the license usually isn't the blocker to getting your tools/projects more widely adopted.
I've written code in the past that I put under GPL that today, I'd probably use a different license for (BSD 3-clause has my preference these days, although I'd just prefer a generic non-commercial license instead). I don't really bother relicensing cuz... it just doesn't matter in the end, these projects are super niche anyway. I picked the GPL since "everyone uses it".
There's always this backlash to demonize anyone daring to move away from the GPL when the simple fact is... maybe some products just don't work in the modern market with the GPL. The hyperscaler thing is a pretty massive issue and the fact that GPL proponents can only give platitudes of "it's working as intended"/"fuck your greed" instead of y'know, accepting that maybe the GPL doesn't work in these environments is... not great.
That isn't a defense of the SSPL or anything like that (it's quite the bad license), but there's a reason that these entities keep writing new licenses instead of going "all rights reserved, we publish source as a courtesy, you can't use it for anything" (even if they effectively close all contributions, they still want to try a permissive license.
Basically the thought that goes into picking the license often isn't nearly as complicated as you may think. It can literally just be "if everyone is doing it, maybe what they're doing is right". Not so much "the GPL gets you more contributors".
I think it might depend on the business. In some places, open source is the "safe pick" (particularly if you aren't selling software and are not worried about things like the GPL). In others, licensing concerns are huge.
> Amazon / Google / Microsoft offer managed versions of the database and make bank on it. Easily millions in revenue. Original creator / company doesn't get anything, and the hyperscaler isn't obliged to pay.
This isn't what is happening. A company called Garantia Data renamed themselves to Redis Labs and acquired the Redis trademark. They're not the original company, and they used a naming trick to present as if they are official (they are now, and nothing they did was illegal).
I really would like to but from working in consulting I know that AGPL is banned in most companies since it’s specifics are completely diffuse and need to be hashed out in court (or are unpalatable).
In spirit the AGPL is what is needed but in practice it kills any corporate adoption sadly.
A license that singles out hyperscalers or goes by revenue is probably a better bet.
Maybe a license that is more clear canbe written, maybe not.
You know Amazon has a hosted Grafana service, right? The AGPL isn't a guaranteed obstacle to hyperscalers sucking up most of the value produced by maintainers.
All companies should do this.. if anything so we know what not to use.
Any sort of proprietary product (be it fully closed source, source-available, or "open source with limitations") is always a risk. You were happily using database X, but they got acquired by Broadcom and now their product costs 100x what it was before. What do you do now?
That's why it is much safer to adopt open source - worst case is the company goes under, but you still keep using last released version indefinitely, and hope new entity (maybe even hyperscaler!) forks the code. Or make an in-house fork if you have enough resources.
"equitable source" license means it's not an option. That new product should really be much, much better than open-source alternatives to even be considered.
> worst case is the company goes under, but you still keep using last released version indefinitely, and hope new entity (maybe even hyperscaler!) forks the code
But it's not always the worst case, is it? If the licence is permissive, an hyperscaler can just take is and make a proprietary product out of it.
Hence copyleft licences without a CLA. Nobody could make Linux proprietary because the copyright is shared between so many people/companies.
I don't understand what you are saying. What has a "supplier" to do in this?
Copyleft is always the best for the customer. Copyleft says "the customer has rights". Permissive says "do whatever you want, as long as you keep my name somewhere in the attributions".
A product - in this case, software - is supplied from a supplier, or vendor, to their customer. Is this business 101?
The usual worst case for the supplier is that they give the product but don't get paid, and the usual worst case for the customer is that they give the money but don't get the product.
With copyleft specifically, the supplier is much more likely to not get paid, but the customer receives the benefit of being allowed to continue the maintenance of the software themselves if the supplier goes out of business. The supplier hopes this will help them acquire and keep customers, many of whom will pay, and keep them in business.
I understand what a supplier is. I don't understand how it relates to what I said.
> With copyleft specifically, the supplier is much more likely to not get paid
That doesn't make any sense. Whether the supplier open sources their code as permissive or copyleft doesn't have any impact on the likelihood of getting paid.
But if they distribute it as permissive, a competitor can just make a proprietary fork. Possibly continuously importing the new improvements from upstream and focusing on differentiating. Whereas if they distribute it as copyleft, a competitor has to share their changes, that upstream can benefit from.
So for the supplier, if that's how you want to call it, it's better to licence code as copyleft. Except if the whole idea is to be adopted by corporations, but in that case don't whine when they take your code and build a proprietary product without contributing anything back.
The original company went under, they no longer exist, so they obviously don't care.
The software user does not care either. OK, someone made a proprietary fork, and that "someone" is a hyperscaler... so what? The last released version is still out there and still can be used-as is / maintained by you / maintained by other 3rd party.
The new maintainers / fork authors should not care too. They base off the last released version, and their fork is not affected in any shape by what some hyperscalers do.
(I guess you can make an argument that proprietary fork might pull users/resources from the open-source one... but I don't think it's a big issue. If the users chose open-source version to begin with, why would they switch to proprietary fork?)
This breakdown hits hard because it’s not just about business models — it’s about trust.
Open source succeeded because it created shared public infrastructure. But hyperscalers turned it into extraction infrastructure: mine the code, skip the stewardship.
The result? We’ve confused “open” with “free-for-the-powerful.”
It’s time to stop pretending licenses are enough. This is about incentives, governance, and resilience. The next generation of “open” has to bake in counterpower — or it’s just a feeding trough for monopolies.
Before moving from permissive licences to non-open-source licences (because they have exceptions for TooBigTech), an easy step would be to use copyleft licences, wouldn't it?
> Grafana's a great example of this. AWS and Azure _could_ have sold the unmodified AGPL Grafana as a service or published their modified versions, but instead, they both struck proprietary licensing and co-marketing agreements with Grafana Labs.
> The company decides to change the license to force Amazon / Google / Microsoft to pitch in and pay a fee.
Could you put a clause in the license that calls out those specific companies that you're concerned about and makes them pay, as well as any of their subsidiaries, a list that can be changed later?
That way, smaller businesses around the software can still exist, nobody gets concerned with the license too much because it calls out specific hyperscalers (no love lost on them in the community) and you still get them to pay their fair share.
Why do people try to ruin everything by SSPL that's overly restrictive and catches everyone else in the blast area, or try to write some clever license that would apply in all cases? Just call out the exact companies that are eating your lunch!
Hyperscaler Anti-Freeloading License (HAFL): If you belong to any of the following companies, or are a subsidiary of them, or operate any of the given cloud platforms and want to offer the service there, pay up: Amazon Web Services (Amazon), Google Cloud Platform (Google), Microsoft Azure (Microsoft), Alibaba Cloud (Alibaba Group), IBM Cloud (IBM), Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (Oracle), Tencent Cloud (Tencent), SAP Cloud Platform (SAP). This list can be changed at our discretion.
No you are wrong. People want adoption by any company other than hyperscalers.
People would be happy to sell service contracts and the like while keeping their code foss, if only hyperscalers weren’t direct competitors to that.
But the reality is that current copyleft licenses means immediate blacklist by most companies legal department.
Which is why almost all cooyleft companies offer copyleft plus some corporate licensing even though in 99 percent of the cases it has nothing to do with the spirit of copyleft as companies just want to import and use the damn package in some completely unrelated internal project or whatever
The combination of unclear legal precedent and corporate governance means that copyleft in it’s current state exactly does not work as most people want
> But the reality is that current copyleft licenses means immediate blacklist by most companies legal department.
Because they always manage to find permissively-licenced alternatives! There are many different copyleft licences (not only the GPL family, take e.g. MPL or EUPL) that can be used and that are not "viral".
> The combination of unclear legal precedent and corporate governance means that copyleft in it’s current state exactly does not work as most people want
This is wrong. What it means is that corporate governance doesn't handle it correctly, because they don't need to.
If a project goes permissive because they want to please corporations, they shouldn't whine when they do. Otherwise they should just use a copyleft licence and teach the smaller companies that they can actually totally use that!
This is the heart of all of these stupid takes. There is no "your money" for anyone else to walk off with. Nothing was stolen.
If you want to sell software, or rent access to software, then just do that honestly forom the outset. And good luck to you on that. I will not consume it unless I have no other choice, and I will not contribute to it at all period, even tertially by for instance developing things that use it or help people work out how to solve problems with it etc. In other words just generally not invest in it, in all the different ways one might invest in something. But hey maybe you will make something indispensible and do it better than anyone else can, and maybe you will get a bunch of other customers.
If you want to benefit from the adoption and goodwill and army of free work that comes with open source, then do that.
The honest reason to work on open source is because you yourself have recognized how much utility you have been given fo free because of it, and wish to pay it forward and basically add to humanity as a whole. What you get back out of it is the same thing everyone else does, the use of the software itself, plus your name being on it.
But if you license something open source, and then care the TINIEST BIT what someone else does with it beyond adhering to the attribution and share-alike terms, then you have missed the point of open source. You are bent about being "robbed" of something that was never yours in the first place. You have no right to Amazon's billions, even the part of it that they made by hosting a copy of some oss software you happened to have written. Amazon is not selling your property, they are selling a managed hosting service. You have no right to the revenue from that. The software being hosted is a community resource there for everyone to use like the air or water, only even better since unlike Nestle taking the water from everyone else, everyone else still has the software.
If anything the supposed injured party in all of these cases are the bad community members because they are often only OSS disingenuously in the first place. They start off with MIT/BSD style licenses because they know a lot of companies are allergic to GPL. But WHY are they so intolerant of GPL? Because GPL doesn't allow them to steal, but MIT allows them to steal. So they start with an MIT-type license because it's "commercial friendly" and then later cry that someone "stole" their B S freaking D licensed software.
People that do that were never writing open source for the purpose of adding to the community pool in the first place. It's either dishonest or at best, possibly honest but in that case just unbelievably incompetent and ignorant.
Yeah, it’d be great if everything was open source and everyone was happy.
But that’s not really what happens. Redis and Elastic are popular exactly because there’s entire companies behind it constantly maintaining it, securing it, and adding features.
If you want use open source software at your job that’s a hard requirement. No, you can’t use “MySillyKeyValueCache” that Timmy develops in his free time with no security or compatibility concerns.
Companies cost money to run. Google and AWS exploit open source work for profit, and don’t contribute back enough to ensure its support. This is what you should be really mad about. The internet giants are literally killing open source.
If they have their way you’ll be stuck with their proprietary software. In practice AWS is already there.
> Companies cost money to run. Google and AWS exploit open source work for profit, and don’t contribute back enough to ensure its support.
I don’t understand this take, if Google/AWS/Microsoft decide to host your service and some vulnerabilities are discovered then you got free Security Research done, your product would either have remained vulnerable or someone else would have filed the same bug.
You own the code so you can decide only certain people can commit PRs and can choose to close any feature requests issues.
If one of the cloud providers decided to use your product it’s because they deemed it reasonable as is or they can fork / contribute upstream.
That is what OSS is, by definition.
Hell you can post the code with a license like MIT and then never touch it again, and if someone else can monitise that code kudos to them.
If you are an existing company and open sourced your code, Facebook/react, then you presumably already make enough money to support development yourself or intend to stop development.
If you open source code that is your core business and somebody “steals your lunch” your learnt an important lesson and hopefully won’t make the same mistake twice. If you then decide to relicense and the community abandons you and causes uproar on the internet you are reaping the rewards of your actions, accept them.
Look, in principle I don’t disagree with anything you said.
However, I think OSS is a net positive to the industry, and would like to see it remain that way.
The classic way to monetize OSS has been to provide hosting and support for a price.
Now the internet giants are taking that entire pie for themselves.
If we agree that we want OSS to be a viable option going forward, and we agree that you need money to hire devs to maintain a successful large scale OSS project, then what do you suggest be done?
> and we agree that you need money to hire devs to maintain a successful large scale OSS project
Therein lies our disagreement, you don’t need to. If you are amazon and upstream is willing to accept requests then amazon can hire devs, and if someone eats their cake then those devs will eventually migrate to the new location.
As someone who did the initial work for OSS I put the code out there, if I dislike the direction a fork is taking I can ignore said fork and keep working on my own version, why do I need to use the version they are using.
It boils down to why did you even start an OSS project, if the intention was to make money or hire other employees you fundamentally misunderstood the assignment.
If you made a project that serves your own need, decide someone else may benefit so you publish it as FOSS online and it gets massive traction how does that change your need, you probably have no reason to make it commercially viable, it is still serving the same need it always has for you.
Now if it gets forked and the fork proves to be of better quality and still serves your need then switch to the fork for your own personal need and now someone else is doing the maintenance, so you end up being the “freeloader”.
And I’ve already discussed the “burden on the maintainer”, if it’s such an issue close access to issues and pull requests. No more burden.
The fork is typically closed source so you do not get to benefit from it and neither does the public good.
This of course means that you should never use permissive licensing since it doesn’t provide many key benefits of what people thought oss would do.
You could use copyleft but i guess with llms it kinda amounts to the same
What exactly is the nature of this fantasyland? I have to have said I wanted or expected something for that to make any sense. You make silly claims based on nothing. That is not an argument.
In fact it's the other way around. Expecting to enjoy both the benefits of OSS and the benefits of collecting rent at the same time for the same thing is the fantasyland.
Then sell software. I said that first thing. Where is the fantasy in that?
If you don't understand it such that you think it's a fantasy (despite the ocean of existing software as proof that is produced, and countless published manifestos from people who do it describing why they do), well that's a you problem not a me or anyone else problem.
You don't get it, that's fine, then simply don't get it, and don't participate in this activity you think is insane.
You are free to have any opinion you want about what constitutes a rational use of your time and effort.
But don't pretend you understand something that the participants do not understand. We're all eating non-fantasy food just fine, somehow.
If they try to sell their software, by your own admission, you won't consume it. That's the point. The fantasy is the idea that some of these open-source products would even work as a closed-source proprietary business model.
Then don't try to sell it. Or make something else that people can't live without and are willing to pay for and can't just pay themselves to write an equivalent instead of paying rent to you forever, whatever, what's it to me or anyone else?
Do whatever you want but it's no one else's problem if you can't figure out what.
I disagree with you on a lot, but you're bang on the money here.
If you want a business, build a business. One key aspect of building a business is understanding what your IP and trade secrets are, how they affect your bottom line, and then controlling them appropriately.
The point is that if there was no business behind projects like Redis and ElasticSearch you wouldn’t be using them either. You’d be using some random Microsoft or Oracle product.
I’m guessing you don’t want that either, so come up with a way to make sure Redis has the financial support it needs to hire engineers to do the full time work that part time contributors like us don’t want to.
The point is I don't have to come up with any such thing.
It is not true that if redis didn't exist then I'd be using some MS or Oracle product. I might, if it was practical. Or someone might have invented redis, or I might if that was a space that still needed filling and somehow no one else did it.
It's like saying if linux didn't exist we'd all be using NT.
That's completely ridiculous. No we would not. BSD already existed and if not that then a minix clone or someone else would have started some other unix clone. There were several small unix clones and other full OS's made by completely small developer teams by then, even single people, commercially. If a single guy can do it at all (regardles that they were doing it to sell), it means the job is not infinitely big and so perfectly doable by a few self-motivated volunteers, especially given how that kind of work has no deadline.
Except "volunteer" is the wrong word because they aren't some kind of weird saint doing something just for you or me. They are doing it for themselves, and you get to have it too.
Everything is like that. Redis is no different. There is nothing magic about redis. Things exactly like that get created when the need for them arises every day. If redis didn't exist is a nonsense invalid premis because 12 redis-alikes will always exist any time the need for it exists. It doesn't matter that I didn't already do it muyself, and I don't have to now either, and that is not just beacause redis happens to exist.
This goes back to my original point. You’re living in fantasy land.
In reality, that’s not how it works. If to use Redis your company had to assign someone to do maintenance work then you just wouldn’t be allowed to use Redis. And yes, you would be using MS Redis, because none of the clones would be secure and supported enough for you to feel good using them.
> Google and AWS exploit open source work for profit, and don’t contribute back enough to ensure its support. This is what you should be really mad about. The internet giants are literally killing open source.
They would have to publish their changes if those projects used copyleft licences. Copyleft licences don't force to "contribute back", but they force disclosing the changes, that the community can then benefit from.
Not sure I understand your message. If you have a copyleft licence without a CLA, then the copyright is distributed between all the contributors, which makes it almost impossible to change the licence. And because it is copyleft, it means that the sources need to be distributed to the users.
So TooBigTech can build a service upon a copyleft project, but they have to distribute their changes, which means that the community can benefit from them. One example I learned about here is Grafana: AWS did not want to use their AGPL version so apparently they pay Grafana to get a commercial licence. That's of course possible only because Grafana own the copyright of the whole codebase. It wouldn't be possible with Linux, for instance, where nobody has the power to give a commercial licence and therefore it is GPLv2 for everybody.
It doesn't prevent TooBigTech from competing by serving the open source project, but that is more of an antitrust issue, I think.
Copyleft are sadly unclear legally which is why essentially no company uses copyleft licenses even if they should.
I mean the intend of apgl is exactly right, but in practice it means you can never ever use it in a company even if you really do not even want to change it or sell it or host it in isolation in any way.
That is really frustrating. Most internal licensing tools i have seen just literally blacklist any direct copyleft imports
Essentially yes. While weak copyleft would be fine for the use cases i have seen, the distinction and the licenses have yet to be tested in a EU court.
As a a consequence there are a numbers of legal options on the matter and as a consequence to that, it is a very hard no from most compliance deps i have seen
There is no problem to solve because there is no rug to pull out. Redis are not owed anything and no one stole anything from them.
When I try to make a business hosting copies of an http server, I am not pulling the rug out from under nginx who actually wrote the http server.
And when AWS does that better and than me, they are not pulling any rug out from under me, or at least not in any way that is special to any of the software involved, just plain old bigger businesses vs little businesses, no different than say Safelite vs Joe the Glass Guy.
No one needs to come up with anything. OSS is already just fine. I don't know what you want, but it seems to be something you never had any right to, and no one needs to come up with anything to satisfy it.
It’s easy to say everyone else is wrong but the majority of innovation and new projects nowadays are coming from people wanting to do oss while still supporting a business with it. That is having it be more than a hobby.
Now you can say that this itself is already a misunderstanding and maybe you are right, but I think you forget also that software reality has changed and indeed there was a time when oss fulltime was viable.
Now the reality is that there is no business model other than closed source or oss with some inevitable rug pull of some sort.
Everyone else is not wrong, and I did not say they were, and so any argument you try based on that is already voided nonsense before you start.
Some people are wrong. It's easy to say that because it has always been true for everything in the world. This topic is no different.
If you want to suggest that you are not wrong, or that I am, you have to present an argument that holds water for that, not anything else.
No one owes anyone a business selling OSS, not even the author of said OSS. If you write something that you want to make money selling, then you are not interested in participating in OSS. That's it. Full stop.
Sell your software honestly.
"But I can't if it's not..." So what? Ok then don't sell it. It's no one else's problem that you have a misguided notion of why OSS exists and what it is good for and why one should spend any time or effort contributing to it.
All the other wailing and crying stems from bullshit you never had any right to in the first place. Not just legally or technically but morally and common-sensely.
> "But I can't if it's not..." So what? Ok then don't sell it.
Interestingly, when it's coming from TooBigTech, apparently they're happy to say "But we can't make viable LLMs if we don't abuse copyright" (yes, they said it). And apparently it works.
Not that I disagree with your point, though: nobody is owed a business selling OSS.
the problem is the definition of Open Source is controlled by the Open Source Initiative, which has been captured by the hyperscalers
which is sort of funny because the term "Open Source" was itself coined to make it possible for people to seek funding to build companies based on the (crazy?) idea of producing software, then giving away its source code
20 years later, the structure of the industry has now changed, and now "Open Source" exists to feed Amazon, Microsoft and Google
if it's not possible to alter the definition to include licenses that include terms that allow sustainable value creation for businesses other than the
hyperscalers, then the term is no longer fit for purpose, and we need a new one
It's really not though. The OSI quickly loses credibility when they try to push a definition that the community doesn't like (see the Open Source AI kerfuffle).
Both the OSI and the FSF are agreed that Source Available with bans on specific use cases is not FOSS. When you've got freaking Richard Stallman opposing you you really have to do better than just scream "corporate capture". Engage with his idea of Freedom, don't set up straw men.
> Both the OSI and the FSF are agreed that Source Available with bans on specific use cases is not FOSS.
well... yes, because they decide the definition of the terms
> When you've got freaking Richard Stallman opposing you you really have to do better than just scream "corporate capture". Engage with his idea of Freedom, don't set up straw men.
Stallman has a very particular view of Freedom (itself a multifaceted term)
and he rather famously completely rejects the term "Open Source"
the situation we're finding ourselves in is one where three increasingly malevolent entities control and capture 100% of the value generated by writing and selling software with source code
if you're an employee of these entities, great for you
for the rest of us, this is a bad situation to be in
and certainly not one that could produce another Red Hat
I agree that the OSI and FSF are trapped with their most hardcore followers, and can't effectively change, assuming they even wanted to.
As for Stallman... his idea of freedom is very narrowly-scoped. In particular, it makes no distinction between hobbyists and megacorps, and is completely blind with respect to economics.
By lumping hobbyists with companies, it makes the category error of extending human rights to corporations. This of course, is nothing new in America, and hasn't been since the infamous 1886 Santa Clara County vs Southern Pacific Railroad court case, that established corporate "personhood".
Corporations are collections of humans. There are certain ways in which extending human rights to corporations a mistake, but allowing them to use free software isn't one of them: either the individuals in the company are able to use the software or they are not, and if they are not then the software is not free.
And in this case it means that it's not AGPL, but proprietary. Which kind of proves my point: they are apparently paying Grafana Labs to avoid the constraints of AGPL. If Grafana was permissive, they would surely not pay.
You wouldn’t use the ten commandments as your only moral guide.
The landscape has changed. Google, Amazon, and microsoft are actively trying to destroy open source business models. Don’t let the leopards eat your face because you were too attached to your ideology.
> Don’t let the leopards eat your face because you were too attached to your ideology.
You're conflating ideologies. User-focused ideology doesn't care about business models. Leopards aren't eating their faces. They're perfectly fine where they are.
Business model focused ideology might care, but the AGPL exists and meets Debian's requirements. Those who care can choose to use it, or not, as they wish.
> the problem is the definition of Open Source is controlled by the Open Source Initiative, which has been captured by the hyperscalers
Thank you for pointing that out.
This is something I have noticed in the last decade:
A lot of fake, captured organisations have popup around open source. I once went down the rabbit hole to try to make a list and quickly found dozen of them.
It is always very hard to understand what they do and employ a bunch of people who usually never wrote a single line of code.
One example found on the Fedora website is the "Digital Public Goods Alliance" [0]
> the problem is the definition of Open Source is controlled by the Open Source Initiative, which has been captured by the hyperscalers
I'm not sure this is true. The OSI's definition of open source doesn't seem to have changed since ~2001 [1] - before AWS was founded - and it'd been around in various forms since ~1997.
This was the era of Microsoft's 2001-era "Shared Source license" which was deliberately GPL-incompatible; Bruce Perens, author of the definition, wrote "Microsoft's Shared Source program recognizes that there are many benefits to the openness, community involvement, and innovation of the Open Source model. But the most important component of that model, the one that makes all of the others work, is freedom." [2] (Perens also judged the first version of the "Apple Public Source License" insufficiently free [3])
They've kinda always been about not just being able to view the source, but also modify it, and redistribute the modified version, merge it into other software projects, make commercial use of it, etc etc
It just so happens that this stance, adopted well before AWS existed, works extremely well for AWS.
I'd argue it doesn't "just so happen" to benefit AWS, it was causal: Open Source created AWS. AWS is structured the way that it is in order to benefit from Open Source, and it grew to its current size by so benefiting.
In a lot of ways things like AWS are what the OSI set out to create when they set out to sell Free Software as an idea to corporations. This was the pitch.
1. People put a lot of work into building databases. The license choice is OSS / FOSS.
2. Some people in the community (original authors, community leads) make a company around the database and continue developing it for years on end. They sometimes raise venture capital to expand the business.
3. Amazon / Google / Microsoft offer managed versions of the database and make bank on it. Easily millions in revenue. Original creator / company doesn't get anything, and the hyperscaler isn't obliged to pay.
4. The company decides to change the license to force Amazon / Google / Microsoft to pitch in and pay a fee.
5. Amazon / Google / Microsoft fork the database. The community revolts. Sometimes the people revolting are employees of the hyperscalers, other times these are just FOSS fans that hate "source available" licenses or relicensing.
6. Database company is forced to walk back the changes. Still no revenue.
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The solution is clear: start your new database with an "equitable source / source available" license from day one. Nobody will complain about a relicense since your license will handle the hyperscalers right off the bat.
Basically your license needs one of a few things if you want to prevent Amazon from walking off with your money:
- A hyperscaler clause such that any managed offering has to (1) be fully open source, (2) has to pay a fee, or (3) is prevented outright.
- A MAU / ARR clause such that hyperscalers are in the blast radius. Note that this also hits your customers.