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Comment by darkwater | Hacker News Reader

Or they could, you know, just respect the new license and publish their changes and part of their "secret sauce". I bet it would be anyway tightly coupled to other AWS internal services so nobody would get hurt in the process.

Edit: fixed typo

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what layers would they have to show? All of them up to bare metal? This is madness, should you be able to show your UEFI firmware? Should the server's out-of-band-mangement firmware be available as well?

The license is plain vague.

This is the key. The license doesn't say what layers have to be shown. AWS isn't going to open source all of AWS. They'll take their hundreds (probably thousands) of java developers, make a proprietary fork instead.

And it's ES that's forcing AWS to do this.

It's GPLv2 all again, yeah. I remember similar comments 20 years ago about GPLv2 code when used for libraries. And that's good, although in the end they came up with LGPL for that scenario.

Anyway I agree that the license is too generic and can use some more details but IMO it should basically cover all the automatism you explicitly create to manage the software you are selling access to. I mean, there is no need to publish the secret sauce for EC2 because it exists anyway and it's publicly available anyway.

To sum it up, I'm not against the spirit of the license but I agree the implementation should be better.

I can't imagine they'd want their competitors to see any of the internals of their control plane or other internal infrastructure.

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