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Comment by awinter-py | Hacker News Reader

Missing piece of the argument -- the AGPL service provider clause (that didn't make it into GPL v3).

The author is talking about physical infrastructure as adding value, and they're right, but there's a middle layer that cloud vendors add to their managed tools -- things like auto backup, upgrade and resize for mysql.

These are enhancements to open source DBs etc that cloud vendors keep in-house as secret sauce. This makes the stock version of open source software hard to operate in the way AMZN / GOOG operate it, while still allowing AMZN / GOOG to benefit from community effort without giving much back.

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With AGPL you still get eaten, just in a different way. The cloud providers will rewrite your software from scratch while maintaining protocol/API compatibility.

That's just simple competition that we've always had. Microsoft working on a competitor to your product was the huge fear of the 90s. Cloud providers competing with your own source code is a new phemonema.

The original thesis would be that brand loyalty would be strong enough to prevent forking like this. "You don't want that third-rate version, get the real thing from the original authors!". It appears that the customer base assumes quality is roughly equal considering its mostly the same code.

And in this case the brand loyalty of AWS is stronger

In many businesses, getting permission to buy/license from a new supplier is way more effort than just selecting another option at the cloud provider you're already set up with.

Could a trick along the lines of the Apple SMC copyrighted phrase be used to poison a protocol against a cloud provider? Release your client and server under a license like AGPL, with an attached file not under AGPL that both components require.

It's not possible to say the code is non-free because it's explicitly free, but packaging and placement (such as e.g. default pip installs using a trademarked name) could ensure at least some pain is felt to make a typical client talk to a server that does not have that file. Perhaps the file's license allows to be embedded anywhere so long as it is only used to play the role of a client

I don't think using evil for good is the answer here. The survival of these companies isn't that important (except to them of course).

Sounds like open source companies will just need to become patent trolls. At least if Google is unable to successfully win the appeal in the Oracle vs. Google lawsuit.

A company enforcing software patents is no longer "open source" in a meaningful sense.

Yeah, but open source is just not a generally good business model, and open source companies seem to be rediscovering the reason intellectual property exists, leading to cognitive dissonance.

Open source is a good business strategy when you're trying to achieve vendor lock-in via price-dumping, a la what Google did with Android (and has been fined for in the EU).

Which I’d argue is not something you should be protected against. Why should you be able to prevent people from reimplementing your product?

AGPL doesn't protect the Free Software business. It protects the Free Software code itself.

The fact that a company backing an AGPL-licensed work goes under isn't the direct concern of the license. The fact that the code itself remains as Free Software, with a source-release obligation, even when run as an online service, is the principle concern.

Copyleft free software licenses, as with the GPL and AGPL, promote the concept and system of free software, first and foremost.

You're right, but there's another concern: who maintains the software? The original developers forming a company that supports development is not possible if the company is not protected by the license in some way.

Under the philosophy of the FSF, that'd be the "commons", i.e., the users of the software take on responsibility for adding new features or fixing bugs that affect them, and then contributing it back.

Without the provisions of the AGPL, an Amazon could co-opt some GPL'd (or even more permissively / less copylefted licence: MIT/BSD as examples), make extensive changes, use the code as part of an online service, and have no obligation to provide source to user(s).

Under the AGPL, the source-disclosure provision persists.

In both cases, Amazon is doing software development, but in the first, they're not contributing back to the codebase. In the second, they are.

Amazon are maintaining the software. Along with other users.

So whats the lesson here? If you don't want your company to become a gazelle, you would have to become a gnu!

Except that Amazon does contribute to less copylefted open source code, so there must be some motivation beyond licensing forcing them to.

Any breakdown you're aware of for that by licence?

Note that AGPL applies to few projects at this point. Amazon is very heavily reliant on, e.g., Linux and Xen, both of which are GPL v2.

I don't know of such a breakdown, there is a list on this page of some of the projects they contribute to as well as their own open source code. https://aws.amazon.com/opensource/?opensource-all.sort-by=it...

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