They would have to publish their changes if those projects used copyleft licences. Copyleft licences don't force to "contribute back", but they force disclosing the changes, that the community can then benefit from.
But they don’t solve the problem of cloud providers pulling the rug out from under companies based on open source companies.
So TooBigTech can build a service upon a copyleft project, but they have to distribute their changes, which means that the community can benefit from them. One example I learned about here is Grafana: AWS did not want to use their AGPL version so apparently they pay Grafana to get a commercial licence. That's of course possible only because Grafana own the copyright of the whole codebase. It wouldn't be possible with Linux, for instance, where nobody has the power to give a commercial licence and therefore it is GPLv2 for everybody.
It doesn't prevent TooBigTech from competing by serving the open source project, but that is more of an antitrust issue, I think.
I didn’t know about Grafana. That sounds awesome.
Maybe you’re right about this being an antitrust issue though.
I mean the intend of apgl is exactly right, but in practice it means you can never ever use it in a company even if you really do not even want to change it or sell it or host it in isolation in any way.
That is really frustrating. Most internal licensing tools i have seen just literally blacklist any direct copyleft imports
Do you really mean copyleft, or do you mean the GPL family?
What about MPL and EUPL? I have heard the legal issues with GPL, never for MPL and EUPL.
As a a consequence there are a numbers of legal options on the matter and as a consequence to that, it is a very hard no from most compliance deps i have seen
When I try to make a business hosting copies of an http server, I am not pulling the rug out from under nginx who actually wrote the http server.
And when AWS does that better and than me, they are not pulling any rug out from under me, or at least not in any way that is special to any of the software involved, just plain old bigger businesses vs little businesses, no different than say Safelite vs Joe the Glass Guy.
Now you can say that this itself is already a misunderstanding and maybe you are right, but I think you forget also that software reality has changed and indeed there was a time when oss fulltime was viable.
Now the reality is that there is no business model other than closed source or oss with some inevitable rug pull of some sort.
And that is not what should be
Some people are wrong. It's easy to say that because it has always been true for everything in the world. This topic is no different.
If you want to suggest that you are not wrong, or that I am, you have to present an argument that holds water for that, not anything else.
No one owes anyone a business selling OSS, not even the author of said OSS. If you write something that you want to make money selling, then you are not interested in participating in OSS. That's it. Full stop.
Sell your software honestly.
"But I can't if it's not..." So what? Ok then don't sell it. It's no one else's problem that you have a misguided notion of why OSS exists and what it is good for and why one should spend any time or effort contributing to it.
All the other wailing and crying stems from bullshit you never had any right to in the first place. Not just legally or technically but morally and common-sensely.
Interestingly, when it's coming from TooBigTech, apparently they're happy to say "But we can't make viable LLMs if we don't abuse copyright" (yes, they said it). And apparently it works.
Not that I disagree with your point, though: nobody is owed a business selling OSS.