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Comment by lolinder | Hacker News Reader

> The solution is clear: start your new database with an "equitable source / source available" license from day one. Nobody will complain about a relicense since your license will handle the hyperscalers right off the bat.

Yes, this would be the honest thing to do, but people don't do it because using a non-FOSS license loses you adoption. The step you're missing in your little timeline is that the only reason the project takes off at all and becomes big enough that anyone is making money off of it is because it's Open Source. Proprietary databases, programming languages, and similar have lost big time and that's not changing any time soon.

So what's really happening is that these FOSS companies want to have their cake and eat it too. They want to release code for free so that other devs will use it and then make money from the project while somehow banning other companies from also making money off it.

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What's missing is why open source won. It's impossible to be rug pulled. If the maintainers (this is a carefully chosen word) attempt a rug-pull you can just Elastic or Redis them. If the product is closed this is impossible and you're at the mercy of whoever you built on. Open Source is the ultimate right to repair. Everything is working as intended.

> Everything is working as intended.

If this true, than we need something else.

Otherwise, expect to see a hell of a lot less new FOSS in the next decade, which will be a pyrrhic victory.

If FOSS can't meet the demands of the time, it needs to be updated or replaced.

The majority of software was always proprietary. GNU was a revolutionary idea. Businesses giving away their product to gain favor is just the natural tendency of the rate of profit to fall.

Selling software is a deadend. Nobody in their right mind will pay for it because the risks are too great. If you want to build a technology business sell services and support.

So compete with AWS or do not make money at all?

What a weird reality, seems hyperscalers have truly won and OSS is dead at the same time

This purist mindset is killing the long term viability of open source. If hyperscalers can make money from successful projects but open source founders can't, in 10 years we'll have fewer open source projects.

Licence freedoms don't have to be all or nothing, or apply to everyone in the world. It can be open source and have restrictions. Anything else turns open source into a religion.

It’s not about religion. PostgreSQL devs do make money right ? Despite RDS.

Sort-of, we've had a litany of Postgres devshops go bust over the past decade. Some will be for the usual reasons but I wouldn't want to discount the impact of RDS.

However I think Postgres is a bit different. It's a bigger market and more widely used. There's a need for tuning services no matter which platform provides the database servers, so there's a level to make money above cloud hosting.

Not a religion, but a term with a specific meaning, which meaning implies a collection of freedoms granted without discrimination. People are welcome to use licenses that revoke those freedoms, but calling them FOSS is confusing and muddies the waters.

See Llama's license: if it can be Open Source while having restrictions, then having an Acceptable Use Policy is okay, right? So Redis could create a license that bans its use if you host adult content, Star Wars fan fiction, or documents containing the letter R?

If Open Source doesn't mean a license that indiscriminately grants a set of specific freedoms then it's pretty useless as a term—all I know on hearing it is that a project's source code is available. Which reminds me, we already have a term for that: Source Available.

Language is defined by society and not by some foundation setting definitions

Open source means exactly what people say it means and what they want to understand by it

> So what's really happening is that these FOSS companies want to have their cake and eat it too.

talk about kicking down. So no harsh words about the big dogs who, while contributing nothing, and just due to sheer size and scale advantage, are capturing the lion's share of the enterprise value?

> contributing nothing

This is a line that gets thrown around very casually, but every assessment I've heard says that the big dogs are quite prolific contributors to these projects.

> capturing the lion's share of the enterprise value?

Ah, here's the Matt Mullenweg logic creeping in again [0]! This is basically his taunt towards DHH (though at least you're using it to cry foul rather than tease!): "although he has invented about half a trillion dollars worth of good ideas, most of the value has been captured by others."

And this is where I think most of this aggression towards cloud providers is actually coming from: a significant number of these companies have bought into the idea that they're a failure if they fail to capture the majority of the value from their Open Source project. Which is understandable when you make a VC-funded business out of it, but makes no sense given that FOSS has always been about advancing the collective good, not raking it in.

[0] http://web.archive.org/web/20241014235025/https://ma.tt/2024...

> big dogs are quite prolific contributors

ok sure, but there's contributing and contributing.

> a significant number of these companies have bought into the idea that they're a failure ...

ok, fair enough. But in that equilibrium you're painting, _only_ companies like AWS will ever be able to monetize open source, especially since software delivery and SAAS are essentially equivalent in 2025, and SAAS is a margin's play which small fry cannot compete with.

VC-funding is also the lever that allows for open source software to find deep and quick penetration in the industry. it's not aws driving it. So when a practitioner benefits from the mature tooling and such a wide userbase of say Redis or ElasticSearch, it is not only because it was cheap (open source), but also because it was lavishly supported (VC).

> I think most of this aggression towards cloud providers is actually coming from ...

I mean, you're certainly right about that, wouldn't call it aggression necessarily.

The software platform is different now than it was 20 years ago. If we want a thriving open source ecosystem, we will need a answer to the fact that big tech can hover up the spoils before the upstarts - that both spearhead the project _and_ fund its expansion - have a chance.

If your last sentence were true, you’d prefer a world where hyperscalers do not fork and close source a FOSS project but the FOSS project continues on to thrive

With copyleft being effectively banned in most companies, it means that there is no viable FOSS business model.

Reality is that for now, many FOSS contributors do it for free in their spare time. Comically critical pieces of infrastructure rely on such goodwill development. But as cozy salaries decline and job security does, less people will have time to work for free. We will have less Foss, less innovation, less new viable projects compared to if there were no hyperscalers.

How does this advancing the public good?

I don't think the license pick is because of adoption - outside of a few specific cases, the license usually isn't the blocker to getting your tools/projects more widely adopted.

I've written code in the past that I put under GPL that today, I'd probably use a different license for (BSD 3-clause has my preference these days, although I'd just prefer a generic non-commercial license instead). I don't really bother relicensing cuz... it just doesn't matter in the end, these projects are super niche anyway. I picked the GPL since "everyone uses it".

There's always this backlash to demonize anyone daring to move away from the GPL when the simple fact is... maybe some products just don't work in the modern market with the GPL. The hyperscaler thing is a pretty massive issue and the fact that GPL proponents can only give platitudes of "it's working as intended"/"fuck your greed" instead of y'know, accepting that maybe the GPL doesn't work in these environments is... not great.

That isn't a defense of the SSPL or anything like that (it's quite the bad license), but there's a reason that these entities keep writing new licenses instead of going "all rights reserved, we publish source as a courtesy, you can't use it for anything" (even if they effectively close all contributions, they still want to try a permissive license.

Basically the thought that goes into picking the license often isn't nearly as complicated as you may think. It can literally just be "if everyone is doing it, maybe what they're doing is right". Not so much "the GPL gets you more contributors".

I think it might depend on the business. In some places, open source is the "safe pick" (particularly if you aren't selling software and are not worried about things like the GPL). In others, licensing concerns are huge.

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