That's exactly what I'm trying to do.
My concern is that a large enterprise like Amazon jumps in and in a few months I see exactly the scenario you describe.
I'll add a contributor agreement right away and it seems a dual license is the way.
My concern is that a large enterprise like Amazon jumps in and in a few months I see exactly the scenario you describe.
I'll add a contributor agreement right away and it seems a dual license is the way.
The people fighting off Amazon are experimenting with non OSI approved licenses which in OSI's terms are not "open source". Elastic and Mongo's "Server Side Public License" and Redis's "Redis Source Available License" were created to stop the hyper cloud PaaS/IaaS companies from "jumping in" without being required to contribute back in some way. The additional restrictions these licenses place make them incompatible with OSI's definition of "open source".
If you release your software with a permissive or dual license (with a permissive option), then Amazon could just fork from that and go ahead and do what they want with your project under those permissive terms, like they do with ElasticSearch - AWS's ElasticSearch is a fork of the last old (7.10) version of ElasticSearch Apache 2.0 license instead of the latest (8.1,3) version of ElasticSearch.
So rather than carve out a huge exception to the conditions on creating derivative works, and then trying to re-implement some of those conditions by placing conditions on use... why not just pare down the exceptions wrt derivative works?
Less abstractly: AGPL says you only have to license modifications if you distribute derivative works to the public, but you also have conditions on use. That makes it non-free. Why not simply say you have to license all modifications if you make a derivative work, unless the derivative is solely for personal/internal use without control or interaction by individuals outside your household or organization?
It seems to me that would achieve effectively the same end, but in a more straightforward manner and by hinging the mechanics on derivative-making rather than on use.
Also, I'm not concerned about Amazon exactly but it can be any other entity with enough resources to offer my product to their existing user base and definitely with massive marketing budget, etc.
I don't think it'd be a few months, unless your software is fantastically, wildly, mind-blowingly successful (or very very very unique). But if you are massively successful in a few years and the license is right, the cloud providers will probably come for you.
Btw, I'm not really concerned about Amazon particularly, it's a general question about someone taking advantage of few years of work without putting in any effort.