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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.

by suyash 6y ago

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.

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.

by 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.