Hacker News Reader

Comment by k_bx | Hacker News Reader

I wonder, could GNU/Linux change its license (in a substantial way) that would allow it to get revenue from Amazon for deployments like AWS, similar to how it was done by Timescale? Would seem fare to get a good chunk of revenue to Linux development.

p.s.: could Postgres change its license to make Timescale share their revenue? :D

View on HN

With AGPL, if you block AWS, you also block other users unless you have additional licenses for your software, like Mongo and Timescale have to do, and I'm not sure people would want to deal with that when free alternatives like MySQL exist.

With Amazon, they were able to make their own Linux flavor so they could pay Red Hat less. I think if Linux itself sold enterprise licenses, we'd end up with a much more fragmented or corporate batch of OSes taking its place, and I think that's very negative for the ecosystem in general. No one wants to deal with that :/

I'm surprised people want to deal with MongoDB at this point.

Why would they do that. These guys are generating revenue by offering managed service, not by selling opensource software.

For the same reasons MongoDB and Redis changed their licenses to avoid AWS et al offering it as a managed service?

That's a different story. Aws was competiting for revenue with the developers of MongoDB and Redis' for profit company. Postgres' publisher does not use managed service as a source of income.

Of course, but I was just offering a reason for why they would want to do that. It’s not as if it’s unreasonable if they did that.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com