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Comment by antirez | Hacker News Reader

Redis Labs is doing fine but probably despite the license of Redis + the Cloud setup we have currently, just because Redis OSS is massively popular. I think that a less popular project that could survive with AGPL may be completely non viable with BSD. However note that AGPL is a weak protection. It takes just the Amazon legal department to say "ok, let's do it" because it is perfectly legal to just sell as a service AGPL licensed stuff. Let many popular OSS projects switch to AGPL and you'll see Amazon switching mentality about AGPL, IMHO.

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GPLv3/AGPLv3 would still force Amazon and the like to share all the updates they make to the software itself, which is good for the software - forcing companies to be part of the software ecosystem - but not necessarily helping the (main or otherwise) developer.

The elephant in the room here is that the usual OSS-as-an-offering model works from the fact that intimate knowledge of the software and visibility creates a strong market position for selling services (SaaS or consulting) that others cannot match. Whereas if "others" includes Amazon, GCP etc., their economies of scale and market visibility tilt the playing field in the other direction, making it harder for the OSS-as-offering model.

AWS is probably unstoppable via licensing, they can do a clean room implementation from the wire protocol - if they really want to. (Though with the Oracle v Google API copyrightability lawsuit ongoing, this might change, but that seems like a small win for a big loss.)

Could go one step further (out of the Oracle playbook) and include a copyrighted poem in the wire protocol itself so that any clean room build automatically violates that copyright too.

Use a haiku For this lovely handshake In the autumn

Ha! I do love a good haiku.

Maybe something like this would be more fitting:

    Way down to the wire
    It gets bleaker than ever
    Try and copy this

They should write the oracle-db then and get oracles business.

Soon! But first they need to stop using it. [ https://www.lightreading.com/enterprise-cloud/infrastructure... ]

AGPL would do nothing to stop cloud providers having hosted versions.

What it would do is mean that a lot less people would be able to use the software as it's a license that is not allowed at most companies. You can argue that this is for the wrong reasons, or it's due to fearmongering, but that doesn't change the fact.

I think you have it backwards: a less popular project could be viable with BSD and wouldn't survive as AGPL.

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