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For me, it's hard to separate "Cloud provider selling a service" and "Cloud provider selling compute, and giving away the free service". On a scale of things th
by mnutt 8y ago
For me, it's hard to separate "Cloud provider selling a service" and "Cloud provider selling compute, and giving away the free service". On a scale of things that are ok to things that are not ok to open source companies: 1) end-user rents an ec2 server, installs redis themselves, 2) end-user rents an ec2 server, runs a redis AMI that a third party created, 3) same, except amazon created the AMI, 4) Amazon runs an ec2 instance on the user's behalf, puts a nice UI on top for "spin up a redis server", 5) Amazon runs an opaque multi-tenant redis system.
Where do you draw the line? Most steps are just Amazon streamlining letting the user run the service, except for the last one which decreases the cost for the end-user.
- chubot 8y agoYeah, that's a good way of putting it. I agree there is no hard line. I would put it somewhere between #3 and #5. On the other hand, there are plenty of legal/licensing issues that rely on fine distinctions. Just in the domain of software: is it OK to copy 1 line of code, 10 lines of code, or 100 lines of code? What about if you transliterate the code to a different language? It's possible that the fuzzy distinctions are OK and they still roughly preserve the intent and business model.