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AWS makes me wonder what the future of open source infrastructure will look like. I'm sure they contribute back at least a little but providers have little reas

AWS makes me wonder what the future of open source infrastructure will look like. I'm sure they contribute back at least a little but providers have little reason to contribute back the distributed/scale modifications they make. They can take any project with a friendly license and essentially siphon away its future user base by turning it into a service. It's basically what a lot of open core companies do but it's different since those companies are usually the creators/maintainers so they have a vested interest in preserving and maintaining it. I'm probably over thinking it but big bang announcements of multiple products does make me wonder.

deegles 10y ago
If I were developing a new project I'd probably go with an AGPL style license. It just seems appropriate for anything that could be hosted. Not sure what the downsides are.
- abraae 10y ago
  If your software was AGPL, we wouldn't use it, and hence wouldn't contribute patches. Plenty of other companies would be the same. That might or might not be a downside to you.
  - saurik 10y ago
    As someone who writes AGPL software, I will say to most of us it isn't a downside: I would conceptialize that scenario as "your loss" and hope that my work helps give companies who are more friendly to the idea of community software at least a little bit of a competitive advantage over your company. In all seriousness: if you are intending to not contribute changes back (which is the only legitimate reason to avoid GPL variants: because you want to use someone else's work while hoarding your own), your gracious "using" of my software has absolutely no value to me...
    - abraae 10y ago
      Totally agree that it is indeed "our loss". No argument there. I don't want to appear a kook, so I won't relitigate what I said in another reply. But essentially we do want to give back. We just aren't always able to give back everything (at least not right now). AGPL, like GPL, is all or nothing in that way. I don't get the option of giving back something, then giving back more later (OSS is threatening to some people - I have frequent discussion at work re why we give anything at all back). Your software, your rules. You have every right to take this all or nothing position! More power to you. But assuming that anyone that doesn't like AGPL does so because they "want to use someone else's work while hoarding [their] own" is, respectfully, a simplistic and stereotyped point of view.
      - brazzledazzle 10y ago
        I wonder if a modified license that set an explicit fixed boundary would help. "You must contribute back any changes to this software that you make but anything that interacts with it at using its API is exempt from the license." So for example if you took the NFS server source and modified it to be distributed and highly available across multiple servers you'd have to contribute that back but the UI or management software you use build for customer interaction with it wouldn't be "infected".
    - shubb 10y ago
      The worry, places I've worked, is that the GPL would spread to proprietary stuff, like a kind of legal infection. They worry that if they use an AGPL javascript library for the video player on their front page, they'll have to opensource the whole web application (I've even sat in on debates over weather using GPL3 programs means you have to opensource any source data you use them to process and publish the result). A lot of this is silly, but a lot of it isn't. A large company I worked for stopped using Linux after they were forced by a court to opensource a custom video processing microchip because they ran Linux on the box and drove the chip through a kernel driver.
      - brazzledazzle 10y ago
  - aseipp 10y ago
    Plenty of companies would also use the non-AGPL software without any strings attached, and not contribute patches anyway. You may be lucky enough to get bug reports, though (and, in effect, become a free labor source for a corporation). So what's the point? Most of the time, this kind of position just comes across as a vague, empty posturing, to be quite honest. "I could definitely be a good friend to you, you see... if you cooperate and help out your new friend". It sounds like a very obvious choice when you phrase it as "we wouldn't contribute patches to you", but that's just a way of holding out a carrot and hoping for people to bite, phrasing it as a "your loss" scenario. At least it is, to me. What am I losing, exactly? My code is right there. I haven't lost anything at all, except maybe some vague, hypothetical possibility of a little extra help -- which, in general, seems to rarely materialize in the way people imagine anyway, for a host of reasons (companies are slow, they're lazy, their hacks are incomplete and unsuitable for an upstream, they're anti-OSS contribution in general and only disallow using the GPL, but disallow contributing to anything, etc). There is plenty of software that, very arguably IMO, should be available under non-GPL terms for a host of reasons, it's true (even the FSF agrees with this, to help support and promote e.g. interoperable, royalty-free codecs, algorithms, which benefit from public domain availability). And licensing is also a complicated legal, political and, at some level, personal topic as we pick licenses that we believe represent our goals and values. We should treat it that way. But phrasing the scenario in such a manner, where there's a narrative that "The only thing the AGPL will do is ensure I write 0 patches (even though I would have likely written 0 patches in any case), so uhhh, think about that", feels like an attempt to poison the well, even if you didn't intend it to be. We could just as easily turn it around: if you literally aren't going to contribute patches, to return some of the benefit bequeathed to you by the virtue of using my code -- why should I even care a tiny bit about you or your company, or whether you "need" to use my software to achieve your own goals? Clearly, you don't need it so badly that you're willing to agree to the rules. Why bother? So you can just freeload on the people who do agree to the rules? If this isn't your intent or I'm being overly presumptuous, I apologize. But even then, I still dislike the narrative that pops up around these arguments, even if I may be reading too much into your particular comment.
    - abraae 10y ago
      I believe, respectfully, that you're reading posturing into my position where none exists. In a typical scenario for us, we use some open source software for our SaaS platform. We need to extend it in ways that weren't envisaged, so we (a) add some hooks to allow extensions and (b) add the extensions themselves. Our preference is to contribute both (a) and usually (b) back to the project. But sometimes for business reasons we can't contribute (b), or at least not until more people internally have their heads around it. AGPL stops us from contributing (a) and not (b). So we just don't use AGPL software. I wasn't trying to poison the well, I was just indicating what our decision making process is. Some people, like us, have valid business reasons for not using AGPL software, even though we love OSS. I find it weird that this narrative thing pops up here. There's no narrative. If I was the owner of said AGPL software, I probably wouldn't give a rat's arse if anyone said they weren't going to use my software. But my original post was a specific response to someone who said "Not sure what the downsides are." [of using AGPL]. So let me try again. Here's one possible downside - *you may miss out on some patches that you would have otherwise got, since your license is incompatible with some people's business needs".
pquerna 10y ago
> I'm sure they contribute back at least a little Almost from 2 years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9358843 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9358843 But gist is, Amazon employees are generally discouraged from contributing to open source at all.
- brazzledazzle 10y ago
  I know they do a tiny bit here and there (there was a presentation here at the re:Invent conference about it that I didn't get a chance to attend) but their usage of it internally probably dwarfs those contributions. It makes business sense even if it's a shitty thing to do. The stronger an open source project is that provides the core functionality that your managed service provides the easier it is for a competitor to build the same thing. Amazon isn't as cutthroat as Oracle but they're certainly much less OSS friendly than many of their competitors.

deegles 10y ago

If I were developing a new project I'd probably go with an AGPL style license. It just seems appropriate for anything that could be hosted. Not sure what the downsides are.

abraae 10y ago
If your software was AGPL, we wouldn't use it, and hence wouldn't contribute patches. Plenty of other companies would be the same. That might or might not be a downside to you.
- saurik 10y ago
  As someone who writes AGPL software, I will say to most of us it isn't a downside: I would conceptialize that scenario as "your loss" and hope that my work helps give companies who are more friendly to the idea of community software at least a little bit of a competitive advantage over your company. In all seriousness: if you are intending to not contribute changes back (which is the only legitimate reason to avoid GPL variants: because you want to use someone else's work while hoarding your own), your gracious "using" of my software has absolutely no value to me...
  - abraae 10y ago
    Totally agree that it is indeed "our loss". No argument there. I don't want to appear a kook, so I won't relitigate what I said in another reply. But essentially we do want to give back. We just aren't always able to give back everything (at least not right now). AGPL, like GPL, is all or nothing in that way. I don't get the option of giving back something, then giving back more later (OSS is threatening to some people - I have frequent discussion at work re why we give anything at all back). Your software, your rules. You have every right to take this all or nothing position! More power to you. But assuming that anyone that doesn't like AGPL does so because they "want to use someone else's work while hoarding [their] own" is, respectfully, a simplistic and stereotyped point of view.
    - brazzledazzle 10y ago
      I wonder if a modified license that set an explicit fixed boundary would help. "You must contribute back any changes to this software that you make but anything that interacts with it at using its API is exempt from the license." So for example if you took the NFS server source and modified it to be distributed and highly available across multiple servers you'd have to contribute that back but the UI or management software you use build for customer interaction with it wouldn't be "infected".
  - shubb 10y ago
    The worry, places I've worked, is that the GPL would spread to proprietary stuff, like a kind of legal infection. They worry that if they use an AGPL javascript library for the video player on their front page, they'll have to opensource the whole web application (I've even sat in on debates over weather using GPL3 programs means you have to opensource any source data you use them to process and publish the result). A lot of this is silly, but a lot of it isn't. A large company I worked for stopped using Linux after they were forced by a court to opensource a custom video processing microchip because they ran Linux on the box and drove the chip through a kernel driver.
    - brazzledazzle 10y ago
- aseipp 10y ago
  Plenty of companies would also use the non-AGPL software without any strings attached, and not contribute patches anyway. You may be lucky enough to get bug reports, though (and, in effect, become a free labor source for a corporation). So what's the point? Most of the time, this kind of position just comes across as a vague, empty posturing, to be quite honest. "I could definitely be a good friend to you, you see... if you cooperate and help out your new friend". It sounds like a very obvious choice when you phrase it as "we wouldn't contribute patches to you", but that's just a way of holding out a carrot and hoping for people to bite, phrasing it as a "your loss" scenario. At least it is, to me. What am I losing, exactly? My code is right there. I haven't lost anything at all, except maybe some vague, hypothetical possibility of a little extra help -- which, in general, seems to rarely materialize in the way people imagine anyway, for a host of reasons (companies are slow, they're lazy, their hacks are incomplete and unsuitable for an upstream, they're anti-OSS contribution in general and only disallow using the GPL, but disallow contributing to anything, etc). There is plenty of software that, very arguably IMO, should be available under non-GPL terms for a host of reasons, it's true (even the FSF agrees with this, to help support and promote e.g. interoperable, royalty-free codecs, algorithms, which benefit from public domain availability). And licensing is also a complicated legal, political and, at some level, personal topic as we pick licenses that we believe represent our goals and values. We should treat it that way. But phrasing the scenario in such a manner, where there's a narrative that "The only thing the AGPL will do is ensure I write 0 patches (even though I would have likely written 0 patches in any case), so uhhh, think about that", feels like an attempt to poison the well, even if you didn't intend it to be. We could just as easily turn it around: if you literally aren't going to contribute patches, to return some of the benefit bequeathed to you by the virtue of using my code -- why should I even care a tiny bit about you or your company, or whether you "need" to use my software to achieve your own goals? Clearly, you don't need it so badly that you're willing to agree to the rules. Why bother? So you can just freeload on the people who do agree to the rules? If this isn't your intent or I'm being overly presumptuous, I apologize. But even then, I still dislike the narrative that pops up around these arguments, even if I may be reading too much into your particular comment.
  - abraae 10y ago
    I believe, respectfully, that you're reading posturing into my position where none exists. In a typical scenario for us, we use some open source software for our SaaS platform. We need to extend it in ways that weren't envisaged, so we (a) add some hooks to allow extensions and (b) add the extensions themselves. Our preference is to contribute both (a) and usually (b) back to the project. But sometimes for business reasons we can't contribute (b), or at least not until more people internally have their heads around it. AGPL stops us from contributing (a) and not (b). So we just don't use AGPL software. I wasn't trying to poison the well, I was just indicating what our decision making process is. Some people, like us, have valid business reasons for not using AGPL software, even though we love OSS. I find it weird that this narrative thing pops up here. There's no narrative. If I was the owner of said AGPL software, I probably wouldn't give a rat's arse if anyone said they weren't going to use my software. But my original post was a specific response to someone who said "Not sure what the downsides are." [of using AGPL]. So let me try again. Here's one possible downside - *you may miss out on some patches that you would have otherwise got, since your license is incompatible with some people's business needs".

pquerna 10y ago

> I'm sure they contribute back at least a little Almost from 2 years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9358843 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9358843 But gist is, Amazon employees are generally discouraged from contributing to open source at all.

brazzledazzle 10y ago
I know they do a tiny bit here and there (there was a presentation here at the re:Invent conference about it that I didn't get a chance to attend) but their usage of it internally probably dwarfs those contributions. It makes business sense even if it's a shitty thing to do. The stronger an open source project is that provides the core functionality that your managed service provides the easier it is for a competitor to build the same thing. Amazon isn't as cutthroat as Oracle but they're certainly much less OSS friendly than many of their competitors.