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Comment by enriquto | Hacker News Reader

> If they open sourced it, it would be less than a year before you'd start seeing "Azure Wolfram" and "AWS Wolfram"

and using an AGPL licence, there would be no danger for them!

An Affero GPL (AGPL) license wouldn’t prevent AWS or Azure from competing with Wolfram’s cloud service, it would just require that they publish their changes to the source code. They’d still eat Wolfram’s lunch, which is why it won’t happen.

Exactly. That's a good example what's wrong in our world. As long as this won't change we won't get closer to the FOSS world that every human deserves.

> "to the FOSS world that every human deserves"

Please explain how/why FOSS is human birthright?

Making good software requires significant effort (both up-front and on-going) and being compensated for that effort is reasonable

There are ways around this. I quite like what TimescaleDB have done, with most features OSS, and the more advanced features are under an open source license that permits use for those building a product around it, but preventing TimescaleDB as a service.

A license like that discriminates against fields of endeavour (cloud companies), so it doesn't comply with the open source definition (item 6):

https://opensource.org/osd

Agreed, which is why I specifically didn't refer to the TimescaleDB TSL license as "OSS".

Then maybe open source definition should update as new ways to exploit it have been found?

Agreed, but I think there would be big pushback from OSS proponents - in theory changes like this are diametrically opposed to the "No Discrimination Against Fields of Endeavor" tenent.

The problem of big cloud providers ripping off OSS works is a new one, but it is explicitly allowed by OSS licenses - really not sure what a "good" solution is here, but personally I like the route TimescaleDB has gone down.

I don't think it is a new problem, there have been people offering Apache servers as a service for a long time. Same for PHP, Wordpress and myriad other open source projects.

There is no open source license like that.

TimescaleDB's TSL license is not "OSS", but it is open source.

TimescaleDB has a good blog post about why they went this route[0]

I do think that perhaps we need to stop being so snooty about OSS vs open source, and recognise that companies with open source products are allowed to make a profit while preventing the big cloud providers from scalping them.

[0] https://blog.timescale.com/how-we-are-building-an-open-sourc...

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