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Comment by xwdv | Hacker News Reader

I’m still not sure why people open source great products then get outraged that someone else would simply resell the product and make money off of it, possibly even more than them.

When I put something out as open source, I’m doing it fully aware that I am leaving money on the table, but it will be worth it if a community of maintainers springs up around the project and ends up making it far better and more useful than I ever could alone. Then I could use that same project perhaps to do other things, which may lead to better money making opportunities.

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Doesn't seem reasonable to compare how you feel about open sourcing personal projects to open source software that a company builds and relies on for revenue. Open source is amazing because it allows all of us to share knowledge and build things better than any of us could build individually, and I LOVE that. When a goliath like AWS comes along as abuses OSS to make money off of someone else's work without contributing back (either with money or code) they're not operating in the spirit of open source and they're potentially making it more difficult to successfully run that company (which IS contributing software to our community). That's not cool.

It’s not abuse...it’s using the license exactly as is allowed.

CockroachDB sees it differently, and so changed the license to explicitly describe AWSs behavior as abuse.

You two are agreeing.

Does that mean we shouldn't revisit our decisions and all your decisions should be set in stone?

CockroachDB tried something. It seems to not be working- so they are changing. It's not as if they are doing it retroactively.

>It's not as if they are doing it retroactively.

You can't do this retroactively.

Does everyone who has contributed to this project over the years have a say in this decision? My code itself will also be relicensed, whether I like it or not.

You actually have the right to appeal that decision, because you own your contributed code. (unless you already agreed in advance through a Contributor License Agreementt.)

> I’m still not sure why people open source great products then get outraged that someone else would simply resell the product and make money off of it, possibly even more than them.

Perhaps I didn't look at the right comments, but I'm not sensing outrage from the community.

The vibe I'm feeling is, "Bummer, that's another approach to funding OSS development that's having trouble. I hope we can find a good alternative."

I think OP means the outrage coming from the companies making the licensing changes, not the open source community.

The outrage is mostly driven by companies that took millions in VC money. VC-fueled open source would always need to find a way to monetize, and "bait and switch" by changing licenses is a tried and true strategy.

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