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> The team had no way to foresee the shift to the managed services model; of AWS taking popular Open Source products, repackaging it and undercutting the origin
by wahern 6y ago
> The team had no way to foresee the shift to the managed services model; of AWS taking popular Open Source products, repackaging it and undercutting the original authors.
The Affero General Public License (AGPL) was published in 2002. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affero_General_Public_License https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affero_General_Public_License
Plenty of people saw this coming. It was completely predictable. The reasons why licenses like the AGPL haven't yet caught on are complex. But I don't think anyone can credibly claim that they were blind-sided. Rather, I think many people and companies simply feared the day of reckoning, discounted the threat, and did as most everybody else was doing.
- stickfigure 6y ago> The reasons why licenses like the AGPL haven't yet caught on are complex. They are not complex. Permissive licenses encourage adoption but hinder monetization; restrictive licenses do the opposite. Pick your poison.
- wahern 6y agoThat was the argument against the GPL, and yet Linux beat BSD. The tension exists, but it's not such a simple trade-off, and the dynamic is highly context dependent. The complexity is in identifying and achieving the best business model. Like with the GPL 20 years ago, the intuition today seems to be that licenses like the AGPL are simply anathema to adoption (because "viral", etc) and therefore market capture, and if you can't capture the market you can't monetize your investment. It's something of a self-fulfilling prophecy, but eventually more people (authors, users, etc) will begin to explore the space commercially and, hopefully, disprove the conventional wisdom.