No one is entitled to their business models, no matter how noble their goals.
It's quite simple: if you believe in the ethos of Free Software, you need to be prepared to the possibility of other people taking your work, doing modifications and even profiting from it. That is the whole point.
If you don't want "evil corporations" from taking your code, then keep it closed and say it so. But don't be dishonest with others when you say that you "support open source" while not ready to walk the walk.
Essentially, the intention of copyleft to increase software freedom, which is the overall mission, has foundered. It is didn’t work and need revising.
Smaller companies are an ally of convenience here.
> the overall mission, has foundered.
Absolutely not. I've never had so much freedom on how to do computing.
AGPL is fine - it ensures that open source projects remain open source. If a vendor hosts an AGPL project as is (unlikely imho) and is able to point to the existing repo for source, then that's great. If they make changes to the code, they must also make that source available through a compatible license.
If the original case for the GLP is still not covered by the AGPL in $current_year open source licenses have failed.
Even that is a somewhat temporary hack. The SSPL spreads to:
> "management software, user interfaces, application program interfaces, automation software, monitoring software, backup software, storage software and hosting software, all such that a user could run an instance of the service using the Service Source Code you make available"
and sure, AWS and Azure definitely don't want to open source all of that stuff now, or for the next decade or two.
But that's not their competitive advantage; that's their datacentres and their sheer gigantic size and deep pockets, making them a "safer" partner for enterprises. National governments won't run a critical service on Redis Cloud when Azure Redis is available, even if the software stacks were 100% identical.
It's quite possible to imagine a cloud provider in 2040 that does run a fully OSS stack and is able to sell SSPL software on a massive scale without paying a cent to the original developers. Doesn't even have to be a new actor, Amazon could spin-off a separate experimental organization for that purpose.
If that were to happen, could another license solve the problem?
