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Comment by fsflover | Hacker News Reader

> if you give your secret sauce away for free, and it gets popular enough, cloud providers will inevitably spin up competitive services using your very own code against you.

For some reason, the author never mentioned AGPL. What's wrong with using this license if you want to defend your open-source business model?

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AGPL doesn't allow you to say "I want AWS to pay me if they use my software". As long as AWS abides the rules of the AGPL they can use your software as much as they like and create offerings based on it.

It's not only about money though, it's also about megacorps extending the code but keeping that code to themselves, not contributing back.

AGPL does help with this. An early example was when Google's search interface answered unit conversion queries using GNU Units. They fixed a bug internally and didn't flow the bug back upstream. Since they weren't distributing Units, but were only executing it as a service, their behavior was strictly conforming to the letter of the GPL. The failure to respect the spirit of the GPL was a factor in AGPL's development.

AGPL code is strictly forbidden for use inside the company now, partially because they consider private modifications to open-source software to be a competitive advantage.

This is debated. Some people say that AWS will never touch AGPL software which accomplishes the goal of not getting AWSed while remaining OSI certified.

AWS specifically might not, but I can say with some certainty that cloud providers can host AGPL software. It's not impossible that Compose (the now IBM-owned cloud database hosting company) pulled in more revenue from RethinkDB than RethinkDB, Inc., did.

Yeah, it's a matter of risk. Rightly or wrongly you could get hit with a lawsuit that says "we have infected your entire control plane; open-source it or die" and every cloud provider has to weigh that for themselves.

To be fair, thigh, when the cloud provider has deeper pockets than the developer of the AGPL'd software, that means something different.

Can AWS abide by the rules of AGPL though? If they don't opensource their modifications and their whole AWS system?

It doesn't help with the revenue problem, it only helps ensure that any feature additions flow back upstream.

Any examples where it was a problem?

The article gave a couple of (in)famous examples...

I just was thinking that AGPL would defend against companies like Microsoft who avoid (A)GPL at all costs.

I'm not super familiar with AGPL and how it might address this issue, but I would love to be enlightened.

Cloud providers and enterprises are afraid of AGPL being "super-viral" so they'll either pay for the non-AGPL version or not touch the software.

Or follow the license and provide their changes for maintainers to merge upstream, making the original project better. Isn't that the point of GPL licenses to begin with?

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