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"The community now understands that the original concept of open source has to be fixed." Well, how lucky for the community that a wise startup came along and

"The community now understands that the original concept of open source has to be fixed." Well, how lucky for the community that a wise startup came along and fixed open source. I get that open source business models are hard, especially in an increasingly commoditized space like databases. Still, it rubs me the wrong way when a business wants the goodwill of open source, then tries its hardest to bend the rules in its favor.

djsumdog 8y ago
Why does one have to make money with open source? Why does that have to be a goal in and of itself. Are people going to take your stuff and not contribute back? Possibly .. that's why there's the FSF/Stallman and GPLv3 argument. Out of curiosity would the GPLv3 at least force providers like Amazon to release any modifications they make to FOSS stuff to turn it into a hosted/managed service? With things like Apache/BSD/MIT, does AWS currently mod stuff without releasing the results as FOSS? (Is Aurora DB really modified MySql or MariaDB under its core?) But going back to the point, yes this clearly violates the spirit of what many in the 90s viewed as FOSS culture. You write it because it's fun and you want to share. If you can make money off of it, that's great. If not, whatevers. The big players only open source middleware. Facebook will never FOSS messenger or any big critical parts of the platform itself. They only open the middle parts so other people can build applications dependent on them and the other big players. I wrote about OSS both in the 90s and today a while back. It's kinda a log read though: https://penguindreams.org/blog/the-philosophy-of-open-source-in-community-and-enterprise-software/ https://penguindreams.org/blog/the-philosophy-of-open-source...
- wmf 8y ago
  Why does one have to make money with open source? Making money is really a shorthand for sustainability. If developers aren't paid, their code can easily fall into disrepair which hurts all their users. Out of curiosity would the GPLv3 at least force providers like Amazon to release any modifications they make to FOSS stuff to turn it into a hosted/managed service? They may not make any modifications and those modifications wouldn't contribute to sustainability anyway. Developers can't eat contributions, so if a project is going to have any full-time developers then money needs to enter the system somewhere.
  - meditate 8y ago
    If all their users are threatening to switch to some AWS managed service because it is better for them, then perhaps the software should fall into disrepair and the developers should get other jobs. There isn't anything wrong with this, it happens all the time. It's probably true that Amazon is able to accomplish this only through strong-arm tactics, but it also seems unfortunate that Redis Labs feels the need to resort to similar strong-arm tactics in retaliation. It doesn't invite anything besides more pressure from Amazon and companies like it. Nobody wins in this in this scenario, especially not the customers who now have no refuge because both competitive offerings are trying to rope them into participating in a turf war.
    - themacguffinman 8y ago
      What jobs? How can the developers get other jobs if no one is paying for their open source software in the first place?
      - meditate 8y ago
        I don't understand, there are still lots of companies that fund FOSS. Publishing FOSS doesn't mean you can't go out of business, it means customers get an additional layer of protection from you going out of business or deciding you don't want to be in a certain market anymore, as Redis Labs has clearly done here.
        ivalm 8y ago
        Sure, those companies make money, ergo why people want to be able to make money while working on FOSS.
    - sauceop 8y ago
      It's a free-rider problem - if large cloud companies fork every successful open source infrastructure project, don't contribute back, and pull away a significant chunk of users, then there's a lot less incentive for other companies to invest in future open source development, because they'll have fewer users and get fewer code contributions. Potentially that shifts things from a good equilibrium where everyone reaps the benefit of many people contributing to the same projects, to a bad equilibrium where every major cloud player develops closed-source products separately. I don't think it affects all open-source projects, particularly not small ones or ones where some is scratching their own it. But it's hard to build certain types of complex production-quality infrastructure without full-time employed developers working on it.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- iceninenines 8y ago
  GPLv3 prevents TiVo, AGPL prevents AWS. Puppet has an Apache licensed community edition, and they make money just fine. RedHat, Canonical, and so on.
  - anth_anm 8y ago
    AGPL doesn't prevent AWS, AGPL forces AWS to be open with their changes. Which I think is better. You might not enable FOSS devs to make much off their work, but you at least force companies to contribute.
    - benatkin 8y ago
      I think AWS would still rather do what they did with DocumentDB.
    - kemitchell 8y ago
      > AGPL forces AWS to be open with their changes. Unfortunately, AGPL is full of loopholes, which are emerging now, because large enterprises with access to specialist legal talent are putting the microscope on licenses for projects like AGPL MongoDB. https://writing.kemitchell.com/2018/11/04/Copyleft-Bust-Up.html#bounty https://writing.kemitchell.com/2018/11/04/Copyleft-Bust-Up.h... MongoDB's counsel mentioned this directly in their statement submitting SSPL to OSI.
- anth_anm 8y ago
  > Why does one have to make money with open source? Why does that have to be a goal in and of itself. Because we need money to live in our society right now. I don't think GPLv3 will help, You need AGPL or even more aggressive licensing.
- ezrast 8y ago
  > Out of curiosity would the GPLv3 at least force providers like Amazon to release any modifications they make to FOSS stuff to turn it into a hosted/managed service? With things like Apache/BSD/MIT, does AWS currently mod stuff without releasing the results as FOSS? (Is Aurora DB really modified MySql or MariaDB under its core?) Aurora is absolutely a fork of MySQL; they're careful never to explicitly admit this in most of their documentation and marketing but their CTO's blog[1] links to a paper that mentions "obtaining significant throughput improvements over the base MySQL code base from which we started," and given how tightly they mirror MySQL with things like version numbers and goofy configuration flags that only exist for backwards-compatibility reasons, it would be hard to believe they built it from scratch. GPLv2 and v3 both allow this because they only require source modifications to be made available when the resulting program is distributed outside one's organization. Since the public only ever talks to an interface and never obtains the binary, Amazon doesn't have to redistribute. This is not true of the AGPL, which has additional redistribution requirements meant to prevent (what copyleft activists perceive as) this kind of abuse. There's an argument that since Amazon's changes are focused around integrating the storage layer with their particular infrastructure, the general public would find their changes useless even if they were to be distributed. Personally don't think this is terribly relevant to the larger discussion around licensing, even if it's true. [1] https://www.allthingsdistributed.com/2017/05/amazon-aurora-design-considerations.html https://www.allthingsdistributed.com/2017/05/amazon-aurora-d...
  - e12e 8y ago
    Good points. But regarding: > This is not true of the AGPL, which has additional redistribution requirements meant to prevent (what copyleft activists perceive as) this kind of abuse. It's important to note that the "kind of abuse" AGPL is fighting is denying the end user the four freedoms. Eg freedom zero: if Amazon shuts down aurora, you lose the right to run the program. Upstreaming of modifications is kind of orthogonal to the GPL licenses - sure if A sells a program to B under the gpl, B modifies it and sells it to C, C will have the [ed: new and modified] source and may give it to anyone - including back to A. But the main thing gpl tries to enforce is that C will be able to use and improve the program as needed. The AGPL is a reaction to the rise of rent-a-program (SaaS etc) - where the user has very few of the four freedoms guaranteed - both if the provider goes bankrupt, and if the provider makes changes.
- burtonator 8y ago
  > Why does one have to make money with open source? Why does that have to be a goal in and of itself Money is air... without money good luck competing against other technologies. I find that the OSS community is insanely naive about where OSS comes from. There's this assumption that it just comes for free like manna from heaven. I seem HN geeks (saying that in a good way) say how they want to use Firefox vs Chrome because Firefox is somehow less evil. But where does Firefox get its money from? Google. Google gets its money from ads. If you track down the source of all the OSS we're using there's some root source that most HN people would not be too happy about. And the flip side is also true too. I often hear people complaining about how they don't want to pay for apps and expect things to come for free. This REALLY screws over a lot of ISVs that are literally just trying to build cool apps. This is really a tragedy of the commons that we don't address very often. Most billionaires have figured out some way to exploit this issue - much to our collective disadvantage.
  - tybit 8y ago
    Just because Mozilla and Google are both predominantly funded by ads doesn’t make them equivalent. It’s not naïveté that leads OSS supporters to believe that, it’s a focus on multiple factors, money is an important factor but it’s not everything. There’s a reason Linux has been so successful even when Microsoft was vehemently against it with incomparable funds.
  - paulstovell 8y ago
    So much this! At first the huge corporations saw OSS as a threat. Their model had been to spend money building software, then charge people for that software. Competing with $0 software scared them and caught them off guard. Now the corporations and VCs figured out how to use OSS as a weapon. And it’s a deadly one! The developer insistence on everything being open source means that it’s very easy for a large corporation to destroy a whole lot of ISVs by just releasing an OSS equivalent. VCs know this too. OSS is used as a PR tool. Projects like React and Angular go a long way to making the parent companies look developer-friendly, even though many developers would normally consider those company’s missions against their values. OSS is also a powerful way for corporations to commodotise their complements. You see this with the cloud vendors jumping behind Kubernetes to ensure Docker wouldn’t be the next Oracle. Developers expect everything to be free and open source. We’ll end up in a world where the only programming jobs left will be at the corporations who weaponise OSS the best.
- jandrewrogers 8y ago
  There are generally useful software projects that require initial investment of time and expertise that exceed what can be realistically achieved as a hobby for a first version. Most of the gaps in open source are software systems of this type. If you need a type of software system that requires 100k LoC of high-expertise code to get to a Version 1.0, you will need to spend millions of dollars. You can neither recruit non-experts to do a credible job, severely limiting the pool of people that could contribute in practice, and most people with a day job will be reluctant to spend the additional time required to write tens of kLoC of difficult, production-quality code -- man-years essentially. And this ignores that most "high-expertise" software designers are prohibited from working on open source versions of what they do separate from their paying job. This is the reason, for example, that the myriad exotic high-performance database engines don't have open source equivalents -- only a handful of people know how to design those systems and their closed source work precludes participation in open source. But even if they could, the level of individual effort required will exceed what they are likely to want to do for free.
- orangeshark 8y ago
  These Redis modules were originally using the AGPL. From what I understand the issue wasn't that they didn't have access to the modifications but that they provided it as a service on AWS which is what Redis Labs also offers.
- fuzz4lyfe 8y ago
  My dream for how to make money with open source is to create some software that is useful to people and then have a subset of my users pay me to implement, modify or maintain it for their specific purposes (example: "My accounting department would like quick books integration I'll pay you to add it in"). Given that i'd be the creator I should be the worlds foremost expert on it by default. Maybe that's naive?
  - rectang 8y ago
    I did this for 10 years, 2 years as a freelancer (barely getting by) and 8 years as an employee. The project has now completed its lifecycle. You don't have to be a founder, you just need to be an expert. In terms of career development, I think the ROI is better on joining an existing project. But "progress depends on the unreasonable" and some people become founders nevertheless.
    - kikoreis 8y ago
      I did this -- working on open source founded by other people, from Bugilla to GNOME -- for two decades, and my experience is similar. Contract work is available for customizing open source broadly, and pays well, but it has all the common downsides of contract work. Notably, it conflicts with the growth-driven VC model which is where open source has ironically become a cornerstone.
  - kemitchell 8y ago
    This is possible. Folks have done it. But consider that by releasing the open source under permissive terms, like MIT, anyone else can come by and do integration/adaptation work, too. That leads to a kind of cross-purpose incentives. It won't be in your interest to make the code easy to understand or adapt. It won't be in your interest to document how you go about fulfilling those needs. You may face conflict in promoting the availability of your own services through documentation or other materials about the open source project.
spectre256 8y ago
I think one thing that's changed is that there are lots of useful projects that would be great to have available in the open, but can't realistically be created as a side project. If small businesses can stay around while creating software that is open to use, and can be contributed to by the greater community, that will allow a lot more good stuff to be built and seems like a win for everyone.
iceninenines 8y ago
You mean like Sugar CRM?
anth_anm 8y ago
Rubs me the wrong way when a cloud computing company repackages open source code and starts making huge money without contributing. Rubs me the wrong way when these same companies can just re implement the API and cause massive hurt to an open source competitor.
- michaelmrose 8y ago
  > Rubs me the wrong way when these same companies can just re implement the API and cause massive hurt to an open source competitor. What do you propose in that scenario. Copyrighting api has never been a thing prior and likely wont be as soon as the whole affair is appealed yet again. Why should you be able to control who makes a compatible part? Do you want your car company maximizing revenue by not allowing you to buy anything but new parts of their manufacture installed by their techs? Lets do it one better fueled by gas bought at a station willing to give the manufacturer a kickback. Perhaps to license the design of the pump connection. This future is so fundamentally broken and stupid we would do better to abolish all forms of intellectual property rather than fall into this moronic trap.
  - anth_anm 8y ago
    > Do you want your car company maximizing revenue by not allowing you to buy anything but new parts of their manufacture installed by their techs? DRM for machinery is absolutely already a thing. What about shifting open source licenses so that duplicating an open source API in a proprietary product, or using a product that does so, is a violation of the license agreement?
    - michaelmrose 8y ago
      You have to be party to such a license in the first place do you expect anyone to be stupid enough to sign up for that bullshit?
- djur 8y ago
  This is what web hosting companies have been doing for many years. It's not new to AWS or cloud computing. There's an entire industry built up around running and maintaining open source software for customers. Redis Labs itself is part of that industry, selling a service called "Redis Enterprise Cloud". I imagine that somewhere in that stack they're using open source software that they don't contribute to, don't you?

djsumdog 8y ago

Why does one have to make money with open source? Why does that have to be a goal in and of itself. Are people going to take your stuff and not contribute back? Possibly .. that's why there's the FSF/Stallman and GPLv3 argument. Out of curiosity would the GPLv3 at least force providers like Amazon to release any modifications they make to FOSS stuff to turn it into a hosted/managed service? With things like Apache/BSD/MIT, does AWS currently mod stuff without releasing the results as FOSS? (Is Aurora DB really modified MySql or MariaDB under its core?) But going back to the point, yes this clearly violates the spirit of what many in the 90s viewed as FOSS culture. You write it because it's fun and you want to share. If you can make money off of it, that's great. If not, whatevers. The big players only open source middleware. Facebook will never FOSS messenger or any big critical parts of the platform itself. They only open the middle parts so other people can build applications dependent on them and the other big players. I wrote about OSS both in the 90s and today a while back. It's kinda a log read though: https://penguindreams.org/blog/the-philosophy-of-open-source-in-community-and-enterprise-software/ https://penguindreams.org/blog/the-philosophy-of-open-source...

wmf 8y ago
Why does one have to make money with open source? Making money is really a shorthand for sustainability. If developers aren't paid, their code can easily fall into disrepair which hurts all their users. Out of curiosity would the GPLv3 at least force providers like Amazon to release any modifications they make to FOSS stuff to turn it into a hosted/managed service? They may not make any modifications and those modifications wouldn't contribute to sustainability anyway. Developers can't eat contributions, so if a project is going to have any full-time developers then money needs to enter the system somewhere.
- meditate 8y ago
  If all their users are threatening to switch to some AWS managed service because it is better for them, then perhaps the software should fall into disrepair and the developers should get other jobs. There isn't anything wrong with this, it happens all the time. It's probably true that Amazon is able to accomplish this only through strong-arm tactics, but it also seems unfortunate that Redis Labs feels the need to resort to similar strong-arm tactics in retaliation. It doesn't invite anything besides more pressure from Amazon and companies like it. Nobody wins in this in this scenario, especially not the customers who now have no refuge because both competitive offerings are trying to rope them into participating in a turf war.
  - themacguffinman 8y ago
    What jobs? How can the developers get other jobs if no one is paying for their open source software in the first place?
    - meditate 8y ago
      I don't understand, there are still lots of companies that fund FOSS. Publishing FOSS doesn't mean you can't go out of business, it means customers get an additional layer of protection from you going out of business or deciding you don't want to be in a certain market anymore, as Redis Labs has clearly done here.
      - ivalm 8y ago
        Sure, those companies make money, ergo why people want to be able to make money while working on FOSS.
  - sauceop 8y ago
    It's a free-rider problem - if large cloud companies fork every successful open source infrastructure project, don't contribute back, and pull away a significant chunk of users, then there's a lot less incentive for other companies to invest in future open source development, because they'll have fewer users and get fewer code contributions. Potentially that shifts things from a good equilibrium where everyone reaps the benefit of many people contributing to the same projects, to a bad equilibrium where every major cloud player develops closed-source products separately. I don't think it affects all open-source projects, particularly not small ones or ones where some is scratching their own it. But it's hard to build certain types of complex production-quality infrastructure without full-time employed developers working on it.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
iceninenines 8y ago
GPLv3 prevents TiVo, AGPL prevents AWS. Puppet has an Apache licensed community edition, and they make money just fine. RedHat, Canonical, and so on.
- anth_anm 8y ago
  AGPL doesn't prevent AWS, AGPL forces AWS to be open with their changes. Which I think is better. You might not enable FOSS devs to make much off their work, but you at least force companies to contribute.
  - benatkin 8y ago
    I think AWS would still rather do what they did with DocumentDB.
  - kemitchell 8y ago
    > AGPL forces AWS to be open with their changes. Unfortunately, AGPL is full of loopholes, which are emerging now, because large enterprises with access to specialist legal talent are putting the microscope on licenses for projects like AGPL MongoDB. https://writing.kemitchell.com/2018/11/04/Copyleft-Bust-Up.html#bounty https://writing.kemitchell.com/2018/11/04/Copyleft-Bust-Up.h... MongoDB's counsel mentioned this directly in their statement submitting SSPL to OSI.
anth_anm 8y ago
> Why does one have to make money with open source? Why does that have to be a goal in and of itself. Because we need money to live in our society right now. I don't think GPLv3 will help, You need AGPL or even more aggressive licensing.
ezrast 8y ago
> Out of curiosity would the GPLv3 at least force providers like Amazon to release any modifications they make to FOSS stuff to turn it into a hosted/managed service? With things like Apache/BSD/MIT, does AWS currently mod stuff without releasing the results as FOSS? (Is Aurora DB really modified MySql or MariaDB under its core?) Aurora is absolutely a fork of MySQL; they're careful never to explicitly admit this in most of their documentation and marketing but their CTO's blog[1] links to a paper that mentions "obtaining significant throughput improvements over the base MySQL code base from which we started," and given how tightly they mirror MySQL with things like version numbers and goofy configuration flags that only exist for backwards-compatibility reasons, it would be hard to believe they built it from scratch. GPLv2 and v3 both allow this because they only require source modifications to be made available when the resulting program is distributed outside one's organization. Since the public only ever talks to an interface and never obtains the binary, Amazon doesn't have to redistribute. This is not true of the AGPL, which has additional redistribution requirements meant to prevent (what copyleft activists perceive as) this kind of abuse. There's an argument that since Amazon's changes are focused around integrating the storage layer with their particular infrastructure, the general public would find their changes useless even if they were to be distributed. Personally don't think this is terribly relevant to the larger discussion around licensing, even if it's true. [1] https://www.allthingsdistributed.com/2017/05/amazon-aurora-design-considerations.html https://www.allthingsdistributed.com/2017/05/amazon-aurora-d...
- e12e 8y ago
  Good points. But regarding: > This is not true of the AGPL, which has additional redistribution requirements meant to prevent (what copyleft activists perceive as) this kind of abuse. It's important to note that the "kind of abuse" AGPL is fighting is denying the end user the four freedoms. Eg freedom zero: if Amazon shuts down aurora, you lose the right to run the program. Upstreaming of modifications is kind of orthogonal to the GPL licenses - sure if A sells a program to B under the gpl, B modifies it and sells it to C, C will have the [ed: new and modified] source and may give it to anyone - including back to A. But the main thing gpl tries to enforce is that C will be able to use and improve the program as needed. The AGPL is a reaction to the rise of rent-a-program (SaaS etc) - where the user has very few of the four freedoms guaranteed - both if the provider goes bankrupt, and if the provider makes changes.
burtonator 8y ago
> Why does one have to make money with open source? Why does that have to be a goal in and of itself Money is air... without money good luck competing against other technologies. I find that the OSS community is insanely naive about where OSS comes from. There's this assumption that it just comes for free like manna from heaven. I seem HN geeks (saying that in a good way) say how they want to use Firefox vs Chrome because Firefox is somehow less evil. But where does Firefox get its money from? Google. Google gets its money from ads. If you track down the source of all the OSS we're using there's some root source that most HN people would not be too happy about. And the flip side is also true too. I often hear people complaining about how they don't want to pay for apps and expect things to come for free. This REALLY screws over a lot of ISVs that are literally just trying to build cool apps. This is really a tragedy of the commons that we don't address very often. Most billionaires have figured out some way to exploit this issue - much to our collective disadvantage.
- tybit 8y ago
  Just because Mozilla and Google are both predominantly funded by ads doesn’t make them equivalent. It’s not naïveté that leads OSS supporters to believe that, it’s a focus on multiple factors, money is an important factor but it’s not everything. There’s a reason Linux has been so successful even when Microsoft was vehemently against it with incomparable funds.
- paulstovell 8y ago
  So much this! At first the huge corporations saw OSS as a threat. Their model had been to spend money building software, then charge people for that software. Competing with $0 software scared them and caught them off guard. Now the corporations and VCs figured out how to use OSS as a weapon. And it’s a deadly one! The developer insistence on everything being open source means that it’s very easy for a large corporation to destroy a whole lot of ISVs by just releasing an OSS equivalent. VCs know this too. OSS is used as a PR tool. Projects like React and Angular go a long way to making the parent companies look developer-friendly, even though many developers would normally consider those company’s missions against their values. OSS is also a powerful way for corporations to commodotise their complements. You see this with the cloud vendors jumping behind Kubernetes to ensure Docker wouldn’t be the next Oracle. Developers expect everything to be free and open source. We’ll end up in a world where the only programming jobs left will be at the corporations who weaponise OSS the best.
jandrewrogers 8y ago
There are generally useful software projects that require initial investment of time and expertise that exceed what can be realistically achieved as a hobby for a first version. Most of the gaps in open source are software systems of this type. If you need a type of software system that requires 100k LoC of high-expertise code to get to a Version 1.0, you will need to spend millions of dollars. You can neither recruit non-experts to do a credible job, severely limiting the pool of people that could contribute in practice, and most people with a day job will be reluctant to spend the additional time required to write tens of kLoC of difficult, production-quality code -- man-years essentially. And this ignores that most "high-expertise" software designers are prohibited from working on open source versions of what they do separate from their paying job. This is the reason, for example, that the myriad exotic high-performance database engines don't have open source equivalents -- only a handful of people know how to design those systems and their closed source work precludes participation in open source. But even if they could, the level of individual effort required will exceed what they are likely to want to do for free.
orangeshark 8y ago
These Redis modules were originally using the AGPL. From what I understand the issue wasn't that they didn't have access to the modifications but that they provided it as a service on AWS which is what Redis Labs also offers.
fuzz4lyfe 8y ago
My dream for how to make money with open source is to create some software that is useful to people and then have a subset of my users pay me to implement, modify or maintain it for their specific purposes (example: "My accounting department would like quick books integration I'll pay you to add it in"). Given that i'd be the creator I should be the worlds foremost expert on it by default. Maybe that's naive?
- rectang 8y ago
  I did this for 10 years, 2 years as a freelancer (barely getting by) and 8 years as an employee. The project has now completed its lifecycle. You don't have to be a founder, you just need to be an expert. In terms of career development, I think the ROI is better on joining an existing project. But "progress depends on the unreasonable" and some people become founders nevertheless.
  - kikoreis 8y ago
    I did this -- working on open source founded by other people, from Bugilla to GNOME -- for two decades, and my experience is similar. Contract work is available for customizing open source broadly, and pays well, but it has all the common downsides of contract work. Notably, it conflicts with the growth-driven VC model which is where open source has ironically become a cornerstone.
- kemitchell 8y ago
  This is possible. Folks have done it. But consider that by releasing the open source under permissive terms, like MIT, anyone else can come by and do integration/adaptation work, too. That leads to a kind of cross-purpose incentives. It won't be in your interest to make the code easy to understand or adapt. It won't be in your interest to document how you go about fulfilling those needs. You may face conflict in promoting the availability of your own services through documentation or other materials about the open source project.

spectre256 8y ago

I think one thing that's changed is that there are lots of useful projects that would be great to have available in the open, but can't realistically be created as a side project. If small businesses can stay around while creating software that is open to use, and can be contributed to by the greater community, that will allow a lot more good stuff to be built and seems like a win for everyone.

iceninenines 8y ago

You mean like Sugar CRM?

anth_anm 8y ago

Rubs me the wrong way when a cloud computing company repackages open source code and starts making huge money without contributing. Rubs me the wrong way when these same companies can just re implement the API and cause massive hurt to an open source competitor.

michaelmrose 8y ago
> Rubs me the wrong way when these same companies can just re implement the API and cause massive hurt to an open source competitor. What do you propose in that scenario. Copyrighting api has never been a thing prior and likely wont be as soon as the whole affair is appealed yet again. Why should you be able to control who makes a compatible part? Do you want your car company maximizing revenue by not allowing you to buy anything but new parts of their manufacture installed by their techs? Lets do it one better fueled by gas bought at a station willing to give the manufacturer a kickback. Perhaps to license the design of the pump connection. This future is so fundamentally broken and stupid we would do better to abolish all forms of intellectual property rather than fall into this moronic trap.
- anth_anm 8y ago
  > Do you want your car company maximizing revenue by not allowing you to buy anything but new parts of their manufacture installed by their techs? DRM for machinery is absolutely already a thing. What about shifting open source licenses so that duplicating an open source API in a proprietary product, or using a product that does so, is a violation of the license agreement?
  - michaelmrose 8y ago
    You have to be party to such a license in the first place do you expect anyone to be stupid enough to sign up for that bullshit?
djur 8y ago
This is what web hosting companies have been doing for many years. It's not new to AWS or cloud computing. There's an entire industry built up around running and maintaining open source software for customers. Redis Labs itself is part of that industry, selling a service called "Redis Enterprise Cloud". I imagine that somewhere in that stack they're using open source software that they don't contribute to, don't you?