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Implications of Monoclouds for As-A-Service Startups
- api 10y ago"Third, because of the freedom extended by the two most popular open source licenses these infrastructure vendors can host successful open source projects without constraint. And because of their scale, they can do it at a fraction of the cost by the startup would." This is why we've kept GPL thus far. So far the only people who seem to have a huge problem with it are for-profits who want to monetize us or put their brand in front of us without paying for it. If you're releasing service code under an ultra-liberal license you're just working for Amazon for free.
- mooreds 10y agoHow does the GPL prevent Amazon from hosting say GNU Health, and charging for it? If the source is free to distribute, and they don't make any changes, the GPL won't save you. Or am I missing something?
- benologist 10y agoThere's probably not much software that can really just scale like Amazon needs to, especially in practice vs theory. There's probably also not a lot of software they want to build that kind of scalability into themselves.
- webmaven 10y agoWell, your premise is too narrow: As btown noted, GPL won't save you even if Amazon does make changes. Other than that, there are some minor edge-cases that are a bit fiddly, but basically you aren't missing a thing.
- btown 10y agoDo you mean AGPL? GPL backend/database code can be modified (i.e. to integrate with Amazon internal systems) and run as a service without releasing modifications, so long as none of the covered code (only its outputs) are "distributed" to end users. AGPL is specifically designed to work around that, but most folks don't release as AGPL (likely because it's that much easier to spread FUD about it); https://neo4j.com/ https://neo4j.com/ is one exception. https://www.gnu.org/licenses/agpl-3.0.en.html https://www.gnu.org/licenses/agpl-3.0.en.html