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This is what people don't get when arguing against GPL: "oh, it's such a restrictive license! so viral, blah blah blah". In this case, it would've probable not

This is what people don't get when arguing against GPL: "oh, it's such a restrictive license! so viral, blah blah blah". In this case, it would've probable not changed the outcome, but could give the author some leverage for either compensation or mention. IANAL, but my understanding is that GPL would require you to keep the same terms and mention explicitly the original source.

suyash 6y ago
I would bet AWS wouldn’t even touch it if it was under GPL, most companies have made it forbidden to use because of reasons you stated.
- toyg 6y ago
  And would that be a bad thing? If the tool is good, FOSS users will get a competitive advantage over AWS.
  - munk-a 6y ago
    I had several discussions with fellow students in Uni about GPL vs. BSD licensing and BSD licensed code is, IMO, more free and more accessible - it really depends on what you want out of your code. Is your goal to provide a useful tool as a one-off that anyone can pick up and use? Then BSD is for you - otherwise, if you have expectations around self-maintenance of the code by consumers then you want to lean more toward GPL. The thing you get out of GPL that you lack with BSD is the ability to pull back changes and bug fixes from users - usually by explicitly excluding those parties which for legal/whatever reasons aren't comfortable re-sharing bug fixes.
    - toyg 6y ago
      Of course it’s more free - corporations are free to take your code and do as they please, as we’ve just seen.
    - arminiusreturns 6y ago
      GPL is about freedom for the user, BSD/MIT is about freedom for the devs. Not all users are devs, but all devs are users. GPL is the better license for net freedom. It baffles me how many people fail to understand this.
      - suyash 6y ago
        "GPL is about freedom for the user" - define what do you mean by freedom, it's different for different people. GPL is the better license for net freedom. - it's not, because of it's virality, it pollutes other code and then demands everything fall into it's license, which is ethically wrong.
        heavyset_go 6y ago
        > GPL is the better license for net freedom. - it's not, because of it's virality, it pollutes other code and then demands everything fall into it's license, which is ethically wrong. Nobody has a gun held to their head and are forced to use GPL code in their code.
      - dragonwriter 6y ago
        > GPL is about freedom for the user, BSD/MIT is about freedom for the devs. Both are about freedom that is only directly meaningful for developers or people that can employ developers on their behalf; permissive license are about simply providing that freedom rather directly, with limitations that tend to be focussed mainly on avoiding unexpected costs to the original provider of the software (liability, reputational, or otherwise). Copyleft licenses compromise direct provision of freedom to acheive broader but less direct social goals which relate to that freedom. If you both agree with the goal and agree with the pragmatic judgement involved in the design of the detailed mechanics in a particular license about how to acheived that goal, its quite possible that a copyleft license is better for your interest. Personally, whether the goal is (and these are two very different goals I've seen cited by GPL proponents) promoting development of free software or inhibiting development of nonfree software, I'm not sure the GPL family (or any other copyleft license) does that better, in practice, than permissive licenses. The GPL is better at inhibiting nonfree direct descendants of a particular code base, but I don't generally see that as a valuable goal.
- graton 6y ago
  FYI: Linux is licensed under GPL v2. AWS uses Linux extensively.
  - munk-a 6y ago
    Amazon has a legion of lawyers and probably quite a few technically apt ones that are actually comfortable diving into questions around whether a chef/ansible/whatever script to provision a linux box will go against GPL - and additionally whether pre-baked containers qualify or if a service to dynamically build pre-baked containers would qualify... These are, honestly, expensive questions to answer as the tech gets more complicated - at what point is linux part of the binary you're distributing vs. an external dependency and, if you get the answers wrong, you'll potentially create an outage that will wreck havoc on the economy by grinding the cloud to a halt and cost Amazon tens of billions in revenue. This is a very, very, complicated situation.
  - archgoon 6y ago
    suyash is basically correct; usage of GPL (any version) licensed software is very heavily scrutinized at Amazon. Explicit exceptions need to be filed for, and are rarely granted. Unless you can make a very strong business case for the software, you're not going to get it approved.
- timonovici 6y ago
  Don't they already use MySQL for example? I don't think it would stop them in any way, unless some lawyers had some really antiquated views, coming straight from the 90's
  - suyash 6y ago
    MySQL has dual license and one of them if friendly to companies who can pay the fees.
darkengine 6y ago
To my understanding, the GPL does not require acknowledging the original author's contributions any more publicly than the Apache license (used by the project). The Apache license already requires preserving the copyright notice, which AWS did. I think the issue is the author wanted a more public acknowledgement of his work, which is a very fair ask. As far as I know, no license requires this (and, I believe such a license would be GPL-incompatible). In my view, no license can enforce being a good citizen of the open source community. In the embedded space, I've seen vendors bound by the GPL follow it in letter but not in spirit (ie, delivering unusable code with a ridiculous toolchain), or just straight up ignore it (what are we going to do, sue?). On the flipside, good citizen vendors frequently contribute upstream even when they don't have to.
- semi-extrinsic 6y ago
  AFAIK, the related question of whether an OSS license for a scientific software can require that people using the software cite the paper(s) describing the software, has been answered in the negative. You can ask nicely, but you cannot demand it under any of the existing OSS licenses.
- pvorb 6y ago
  > On the flipside, good citizen vendors frequently contribute upstream even when they don't have to. I once discussed that with my employer and they agreed: it's almost never a good idea to fork a product in order to fix bugs, since you will have to continouiusly maintain the fork. If you get the fix upstream, you'll get the maintenance for free. So this often is not out of generosity, but rather in their own interests.
- lutorm 6y ago
  My understanding is that GPL doesn't force the user to do _anything_ except license any derived work under GPL. It specifically doesn't put _any_ limits on what someone can do with that code precisely because doing so would limit your freedom (with the exception of the licensing issue which is required so as to not deprive _other_ people of the freedom to do what they want with the code.) It specifically does not require you to pay homage to the original author. The point is to ensure that the code remains free, the original author has no say over what happens to it.
heavyset_go 6y ago
AGPL would also force Amazon to open-source their changes to services that they release that use AGPL code.

suyash 6y ago

I would bet AWS wouldn’t even touch it if it was under GPL, most companies have made it forbidden to use because of reasons you stated.

toyg 6y ago
And would that be a bad thing? If the tool is good, FOSS users will get a competitive advantage over AWS.
- munk-a 6y ago
  I had several discussions with fellow students in Uni about GPL vs. BSD licensing and BSD licensed code is, IMO, more free and more accessible - it really depends on what you want out of your code. Is your goal to provide a useful tool as a one-off that anyone can pick up and use? Then BSD is for you - otherwise, if you have expectations around self-maintenance of the code by consumers then you want to lean more toward GPL. The thing you get out of GPL that you lack with BSD is the ability to pull back changes and bug fixes from users - usually by explicitly excluding those parties which for legal/whatever reasons aren't comfortable re-sharing bug fixes.
  - toyg 6y ago
    Of course it’s more free - corporations are free to take your code and do as they please, as we’ve just seen.
  - arminiusreturns 6y ago
    GPL is about freedom for the user, BSD/MIT is about freedom for the devs. Not all users are devs, but all devs are users. GPL is the better license for net freedom. It baffles me how many people fail to understand this.
    - suyash 6y ago
      "GPL is about freedom for the user" - define what do you mean by freedom, it's different for different people. GPL is the better license for net freedom. - it's not, because of it's virality, it pollutes other code and then demands everything fall into it's license, which is ethically wrong.
      - heavyset_go 6y ago
        > GPL is the better license for net freedom. - it's not, because of it's virality, it pollutes other code and then demands everything fall into it's license, which is ethically wrong. Nobody has a gun held to their head and are forced to use GPL code in their code.
    - dragonwriter 6y ago
      > GPL is about freedom for the user, BSD/MIT is about freedom for the devs. Both are about freedom that is only directly meaningful for developers or people that can employ developers on their behalf; permissive license are about simply providing that freedom rather directly, with limitations that tend to be focussed mainly on avoiding unexpected costs to the original provider of the software (liability, reputational, or otherwise). Copyleft licenses compromise direct provision of freedom to acheive broader but less direct social goals which relate to that freedom. If you both agree with the goal and agree with the pragmatic judgement involved in the design of the detailed mechanics in a particular license about how to acheived that goal, its quite possible that a copyleft license is better for your interest. Personally, whether the goal is (and these are two very different goals I've seen cited by GPL proponents) promoting development of free software or inhibiting development of nonfree software, I'm not sure the GPL family (or any other copyleft license) does that better, in practice, than permissive licenses. The GPL is better at inhibiting nonfree direct descendants of a particular code base, but I don't generally see that as a valuable goal.
graton 6y ago
FYI: Linux is licensed under GPL v2. AWS uses Linux extensively.
- munk-a 6y ago
  Amazon has a legion of lawyers and probably quite a few technically apt ones that are actually comfortable diving into questions around whether a chef/ansible/whatever script to provision a linux box will go against GPL - and additionally whether pre-baked containers qualify or if a service to dynamically build pre-baked containers would qualify... These are, honestly, expensive questions to answer as the tech gets more complicated - at what point is linux part of the binary you're distributing vs. an external dependency and, if you get the answers wrong, you'll potentially create an outage that will wreck havoc on the economy by grinding the cloud to a halt and cost Amazon tens of billions in revenue. This is a very, very, complicated situation.
- archgoon 6y ago
  suyash is basically correct; usage of GPL (any version) licensed software is very heavily scrutinized at Amazon. Explicit exceptions need to be filed for, and are rarely granted. Unless you can make a very strong business case for the software, you're not going to get it approved.
timonovici 6y ago
Don't they already use MySQL for example? I don't think it would stop them in any way, unless some lawyers had some really antiquated views, coming straight from the 90's
- suyash 6y ago
  MySQL has dual license and one of them if friendly to companies who can pay the fees.

darkengine 6y ago

To my understanding, the GPL does not require acknowledging the original author's contributions any more publicly than the Apache license (used by the project). The Apache license already requires preserving the copyright notice, which AWS did. I think the issue is the author wanted a more public acknowledgement of his work, which is a very fair ask. As far as I know, no license requires this (and, I believe such a license would be GPL-incompatible). In my view, no license can enforce being a good citizen of the open source community. In the embedded space, I've seen vendors bound by the GPL follow it in letter but not in spirit (ie, delivering unusable code with a ridiculous toolchain), or just straight up ignore it (what are we going to do, sue?). On the flipside, good citizen vendors frequently contribute upstream even when they don't have to.

semi-extrinsic 6y ago
AFAIK, the related question of whether an OSS license for a scientific software can require that people using the software cite the paper(s) describing the software, has been answered in the negative. You can ask nicely, but you cannot demand it under any of the existing OSS licenses.
pvorb 6y ago
> On the flipside, good citizen vendors frequently contribute upstream even when they don't have to. I once discussed that with my employer and they agreed: it's almost never a good idea to fork a product in order to fix bugs, since you will have to continouiusly maintain the fork. If you get the fix upstream, you'll get the maintenance for free. So this often is not out of generosity, but rather in their own interests.
lutorm 6y ago
My understanding is that GPL doesn't force the user to do _anything_ except license any derived work under GPL. It specifically doesn't put _any_ limits on what someone can do with that code precisely because doing so would limit your freedom (with the exception of the licensing issue which is required so as to not deprive _other_ people of the freedom to do what they want with the code.) It specifically does not require you to pay homage to the original author. The point is to ensure that the code remains free, the original author has no say over what happens to it.

heavyset_go 6y ago

AGPL would also force Amazon to open-source their changes to services that they release that use AGPL code.