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Comment by mythz | Hacker News Reader

Fair and equatable distribution wouldn't factor into any consideration for Companies paying developers and cloud hosting companies to run their businesses.

IMO the best way would be for all OSS developers to come together and agree on a standard "OSS-like" license which is basically "OSS and free for everyone else except cloud hosters", if enough OSS developers do this it will force the major cloud vendors to implement a system to revenue share back to the creators of OSS their hosting.

I'm puzzled why Redis Labs, Elastic, Confluent and Mongo DB aren't already coming together to use the same standardized license as there's strength in numbers - instead they're each individually releasing their commercial efforts under their own individually branded license.

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Do you mean I could install this software on a box physically located in a building owned by my employer, but not on a virtual host?

I think you are trying to mean not that. Like, if I install it myself, it's okay, but if the "cloud vendor" installs it for me, that violates the license?

I think I understand the sorts of entities you have in mind to allow or not allow; I'm not sure it's clear how you'd write a license like that.

"The cloud" is in the end just hardware somewhere else. I think you are maybe fantasizing about a license that would be more about _what sorts of businesses_ are allowed to use it, than it is about _how_ it's run. The OSI open source definition does not allow licenses that "restrict anyone from making use of the program in a specific field of endeavor. For example, it may not restrict the program from being used in a business, or from being used for genetic research." You could think that's an inappropriate restriction I guess. https://opensource.org/osd-annotated

It would just need to prohibit usage by the 3 major cloud monopolies, using any language that just applies to all 3 of them, e.g. a commercial license is required if earning over $1 Billion total from hosting Services.

It could also prohibit any commercial cloud hosting without written permission, for which it's automatically granted to every company that isn't Amazon, Microsoft or Alphabet.

> puzzled why Redis Labs, Elastic, Confluent and Mongo DB aren't already coming together

At some point would it be collusion? I think collusion needs consumers, but the consumers of the cloud vendors would be harmed?

Collusion is secret or illegal cooperation or conspiracy in order to cheat or deceive others.

As with any standardization efforts this is just cooperation, there's nothing secretive, illegal or deceitful about it - they'd just be coming together to standardize on a License to build a sustainable business model that prevents cloud monopolies from using their OSS efforts to compete against them.

No, I don't think so - they are not in competition among themselves. They just share a common threat because they chose a similar type of conducting business.

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