What do you think "weaponize open source" means? It doesn't look like it means a thing, and lounds like a poor attempt at shoehorning "weapon" in a discussion on how a potential user's income is something noteworthy.
Traditionally, one of the best paths for an upstart company to challenge an established giant was to develop superior technology. Indeed, this is how some of the cloud giants themselves got their start against the dinosaurs of the day.
But in a tech culture where open source is not just common but expected, this path is severely hampered. A lot of tech users won't even consider your fancy new technology if it isn't open source, but if it is, then the giants can put it on their platform and make your customers into theirs.
This is what "Microsoft loves open source" means. When they had the (commercially) superior tech, they disparaged open source as nonsense so they wouldn't be asked to share. Twenty years later, when they realized that there was more and better tech out there than they could hope to produce, they aligned and supported that very ideology so that "we have Redis" or "we have Akka" wouldn't be a competitive advantage anymore.
Ultimately, it's a twist on the old "commodify your competition".
Also, when was the last time an “upstart” challenged a giant successfully?
- Microsoft has been a “giant” since 2000
- Apple became the worlds most valuable company in 2011.
- Google has been the go to search engine at least since the early 2000s
- Amazon has been dominant in its field at least since around 2000.
[1] Jassy is my skip^9 manager
[2] https://accelerationeconomy.com/cloud/amazon-shocker-ceo-jas...
https://www.lightbend.com/blog/low-cpu-utilization-fortune-5...
[1] As found on https://akka.io/
The AGPL already solves this. Whatever secret sauce the giants add to do that, you can just take it and add it back to your original program.
The AGPL does nothing to prevent that. They aren't modifying Akka, they're just running it on a superior platform.
One license that does force the giants to share (the software part of) their secret sauce exists and is called SSPL, the one the MongoDB guys came up with.
I think you're thinking of "commodify your complement"? Commodifying your competition would seem to be a bad thing, as prices drop for something that substitutes for what you're selling. Might work in particular luxury/Veblen goods, but seems likely to be less of a thing? (and certainly a different thing than "commodify your complement")
Liberal open source licenses are the perfect weapon for the monopolists because they ensure an "equal" playing field, meaning they have access to the same tech that smaller companies have. All things being equal, they can always crush the competition with their market position.
Can you please explain exactly what's wrong with that? I mean, the whole point of FLOSS is to ensure everyone has the right to access, fix, and alter the software. Why do you feel anyone's revenue is relevant?
> Liberal open source licenses are the perfect weapon for the monopolists because they ensure an "equal" playing field, meaning they have access to the same tech that smaller companies have.
Your comment makes zero sense. FLOSS is about ensuring the right to use, fix, and alter software. It's not about people with a axe to grind about competitors providing a better service.
The only weapon I see here is people trying to abuse the concept of FLOSS to complain about their inability to profit from other people's software because others do a better job.
Not being relevant isn't the same as not being important.
The aims of FLOSS are good thing, and they are successfully achieved when every computer in the world runs 100% FLOSS code.
But if all code is FLOSS, then the cloud giants can sleep unchallenged, because they have the best machines to run the same code as everybody else. This is an entirely unintended side-effect.
If you consider it an undesirable side-effect as well (and I do), the BSL and similar licenses are a reasonable next step. They preserve the social benefits of open source licenses, while leaving room for upstarts to build a small moat to challenge the cloud giants' gigantic ones.
The point is you can NOT outcompete Amazon on that as a smaller company. They have economics of scale on their side, brand recognition, marketing budget, the whole AWS ecosystem that locks developers in. Even if you offered a better and cheaper service (which is not really realistic) then most customers would stick to AWS because they are hosting everything else on it and it is easier that working with multiple providers.
Are you not aware how monopolists work?
