Step back from FOSS for a second.
I think most people would agree that there’s somewhat of a moral issue with just taking someone else’s open source software and just hosting it and making billions, with nothing for the creators, because you are a megacorp who is good at hosting.
Now, is there a way to solve that and have the benefits of FOSS?
Both Mongo and MariaDB have tried to address this with licensing - MariaDB seems to have done this much less clumsily than Mongo, but both still had FOSS advocates shrieking
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EDIT to include response to below comments so everyone doesn't keep repeating the same things:
> Either your product is fully free and you accept that people can fork it, even Amazon, or you choose a restrictive license. You can't make "free" (as in libre) compatible with "but".
> I can totally see that you think this is unfair, but they did allow it and they were perfectly happy when being FOSS brought them market share. You have to take the good with the bad
> If you have a moral qualm with bigcorps using your work for free, you don’t license in such a way that they can. Make your own license, or slap AGPL3 on it - either way, no bigcorp touches it.
> But you cannot be mad when you say “I release this code under these terms” and AWS takes you up on your offer.
If everyone stomps their feet and says "there's no solution, otherwise it's not OSS!" then the end result is only going to be a lot less open-source software.
I'm not asking if someone who wrote code and chose an existing OSS license that allows any possible usage has any real recourse once they want to make money off of it - obviously not.
I am asking, can we find a way to ensure software creators are compensated while still having the generally-recognized benefits of FOSS?
> Don't you think there's a moral issue expecting free contributions to something which only you are allowed to monetize?
Nowhere in OSS licenses does it include the expectations of free contributions
> And how can you satisfy users to the greatest extent while also preventing them from using the provider that is best able to meet their needs?
Again, can we just find a way for the creators to be compensated?
I'd love for the OSS to be available as a hosted solution to be available on every cloud provider, including if the original creators choose to provide a cloud hosting.
I'd also love for the original creators to be able to get some sliver of the money AWS/Google/Azure are making off of it.
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To me it seems like if you were to start a business around your open-source code right now, you would be smart to do one of these two things:
1. a MariaDB/CockroachDB BSL approach, where the newest versions are BSL, with a restriction that you can't provide a product where you just host our software without paying us, then all code automatically is fully open-source (GPL or whatever) after x amount of time, or x major version releases.
- this comes with the danger of all the bad PR and gnashing of teeth that comes with non-pure-OSS licenses, or people just not adopting it because they dislike or don't understand the license
- this seems even more dangerous, that you have to be distracted on such things that are not the core product in order to defend against ending up like Docker, with everyone using it and no one paying you a dime.If you have a moral qualm with bigcorps using your work for free, you don’t license in such a way that they can. Make your own license, or slap AGPL3 on it - either way, no bigcorp touches it.
But you cannot be mad when you say “I release this code under these terms” and AWS takes you up on your offer.
Personally, I am a fan of AGPLv3. But I am uncomfortable with advice to apply APLv3 code in an expectation that BigCorps will not touch it. There are many very large companies, including multinational companies based in China, that have no fear of AGPLv3, and are also prepared to meet the obligations of the license.
Many times I have read (including in comments down thread) that "big companies fear AGPLv3." That may be true in some cases, but not all. And the state of adoption or rejection of community licenses changes over time. 25 years ago, many companies "feared" GPLv2.
That changed, and now GPLv2 is widely accepted. The same could happen for AGPLv3, and personally I think that the movements that advocate for Software Freedom will be closer to achieving their goals if that happened.
Google won’t: https://opensource.google/documentation/reference/using/agpl...
Unless things have changed recently I know Amazon won’t, and I’m fairly sure Facebook still won’t.
For most corporations it’s simply not worth the risk
There's going to be less people trading on the idea of open source software while relying on the exclusivity of control of proprietary software—which in fact does not solve the problems which lead users to prefer open source software—to enable monetization, so we’ll be back to the status quo before the last handful of years where open source software was peripheral projects and supporting infrastructure funded by its users either as internal projects or via external foundations, rather than the central products of startups that have no business plan consistent with the product remaining open. But that’s okay.
1) there's a lot of software that's mostly-open-source-except-Amazon-isnt-allowed-to-run-a-hosted-version-of-it-without-paying-the-authors
2) all the software from 1) is completely proprietary
a lot more people benefit from 1 than 2. But somehow it seems that OSS purists prefer #2? It seems like they would rather less Open-Source Software in the world, all to maintain the purity of the meaning?
That's...not mostly open source. Being able to pay whomever to run a hosted version for you and not have that be exclusive to the original creators isn't, especially in the age when hosted services are in high demand, a peripheral feature of open source. It's integral to the value proposition.
For example, if ElasticSearch would have been closed source? People would go to Solr. If Solr closes? Postgres and a lot of swearing.
You have to remember that while AWS ElasticSearch was a bad thing for Elastic Co, it was absolutely great for all sorts of much smaller companies who did not have enough resources to run their own clusters, as Elastic's offering is 2x price of AWS one [0].
[0] https://medium.com/gigasearch/which-elasticsearch-provider-i...
(Of course, for the Linux kernel, many companies don't comply with with the license either).
This feels like an oxymoron: if it's open source licensed there is explicitly no 'owner.'
They sell a hosted service that uses the software. They're not selling the software.
Pretty difficult to see how a company building a SaaS business around some software is not "for their own use".
Coupling that with the fact that, in the past, F/OSS project control or domination by a single party hasn't turned out well.