4 ms·

> Not many people would have imagined that the monopolists would weaponize open source like they do now. What do you think "weaponize open source" means? It do

> Not many people would have imagined that the monopolists would weaponize open source like they do now. What do you think "weaponize open source" means? It doesn't look like it means a thing, and lounds like a poor attempt at shoehorning "weapon" in a discussion on how a potential user's income is something noteworthy.

cardanome 4y ago
Companies like Amazon offering open source software as a hosting service can out-compete any other companies offering the same just based on market position. Liberal open source licenses are the perfect weapon for the monopolists because they ensure an "equal" playing field, meaning they have access to the same tech that smaller companies have. All things being equal, they can always crush the competition with their market position.
- arinlen 4y ago
  > Companies like Amazon offering open source software as a hosting service can out-compete any other companies offering the same just based on market position. Can you please explain exactly what's wrong with that? I mean, the whole point of FLOSS is to ensure everyone has the right to access, fix, and alter the software. Why do you feel anyone's revenue is relevant? > Liberal open source licenses are the perfect weapon for the monopolists because they ensure an "equal" playing field, meaning they have access to the same tech that smaller companies have. Your comment makes zero sense. FLOSS is about ensuring the right to use, fix, and alter software. It's not about people with a axe to grind about competitors providing a better service. The only weapon I see here is people trying to abuse the concept of FLOSS to complain about their inability to profit from other people's software because others do a better job.
  - cardanome 4y ago
    > about competitors providing a better service The point is you can NOT outcompete Amazon on that as a smaller company. They have economics of scale on their side, brand recognition, marketing budget, the whole AWS ecosystem that locks developers in. Even if you offered a better and cheaper service (which is not really realistic) then most customers would stick to AWS because they are hosting everything else on it and it is easier that working with multiple providers. Are you not aware how monopolists work?
    - zozbot234 4y ago
      And yet there's plenty of competition in the network infrastructure market, including by smaller players. You think DigitalOcean and Hetzner are not in a closely related market to AWS or Azure?
    - arinlen 4y ago
      > The point is you can NOT outcompete Amazon on that as a smaller company. It looks to me that AWS only has around 30% of the cloud market, and CloudFlare is outcompeting AWS in some market segments oddly enough due to things like CloudFlare Worker's, which are developed from the V8 engine which is as FLOSS as it gets. It looks like behind the thin veil of a badly formed "unfair competition" argument, there's only an irrational concern that revenue should be tied to rights to access software developed by a third-party.
      - Dylan16807 4y ago
        I think "smaller" there is supposed to mean "on the small end" and not a direct comparison to Amazon. CloudFlare is not an example of such a company. > irrational concern that revenue should be tied to rights to access software developed by a third-party It's the rational concern that major developers of widely-used software should be paid.
  - piaste 4y ago
    > The whole point of FLOSS is to ensure everyone has the right to access, fix, and alter the software. Why do you feel anyone's revenue is relevant? Not being relevant isn't the same as not being important. The aims of FLOSS are good thing, and they are successfully achieved when every computer in the world runs 100% FLOSS code. But if all code is FLOSS, then the cloud giants can sleep unchallenged, because they have the best machines to run the same code as everybody else. This is an entirely unintended side-effect. If you consider it an undesirable side-effect as well (and I do), the BSL and similar licenses are a reasonable next step. They preserve the social benefits of open source licenses, while leaving room for upstarts to build a small moat to challenge the cloud giants' gigantic ones.
    - yawaramin 4y ago
      > They preserve the social benefits of open source licenses What benefits? By not being FLOSS they just removed most of the rights and freedoms that users would have with the software.
      - deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
      - piaste 4y ago
        I don't think this level of absolutism is justified. I think that it's a stretch to define cloud providers as "users" in the first place: What is Akka? A distributed messaging platform. If you want to use Akka to move messages, then the SSPL is just like the AGPL to you. (Even if you're Amazon! No discrimination against trillion-dollar companies!) If you want to use Akka and Akka's code to learn how messaging work, then the SSPL is just like the AGPL to you. If you want to use Akka's code as a starting point to author your custom messaging platform, then the SSPL is just like the AGPL to you. When is it not like the AGPL to you? Only when you don't want to actually use Akka yourself, but you want to charge others a fee to let them use Akka on your server. In that case, and only in that case, SSPL says "you are not a user of this program and are not entitled to the Four Freedoms". I find myself in agreement with that assessment. EDIT: I originally mentioned the BSL in this thread, that was a mistake. The BSL (free except for users >$25M) is a non-free license that I consider legitimate and understandable and better than almost any other non-free license, but less than ideal. The SSPL (free except for cloud providers) is the non-free license that I find most acceptable, to the point where I think AGPL projects will make the world a better place by switching to the SSPL.
piaste 4y ago
The cloud giants have gigantic moats in terms of infrastructure, marketing, process, and so on. Traditionally, one of the best paths for an upstart company to challenge an established giant was to develop superior technology. Indeed, this is how some of the cloud giants themselves got their start against the dinosaurs of the day. But in a tech culture where open source is not just common but expected, this path is severely hampered. A lot of tech users won't even consider your fancy new technology if it isn't open source, but if it is, then the giants can put it on their platform and make your customers into theirs. This is what "Microsoft loves open source" means. When they had the (commercially) superior tech, they disparaged open source as nonsense so they wouldn't be asked to share. Twenty years later, when they realized that there was more and better tech out there than they could hope to produce, they aligned and supported that very ideology so that "we have Redis" or "we have Akka" wouldn't be a competitive advantage anymore. Ultimately, it's a twist on the old "commodify your competition".
- josephcsible 4y ago
  > if it is, then the giants can put it on their platform and make your customers into theirs. The AGPL already solves this. Whatever secret sauce the giants add to do that, you can just take it and add it back to your original program.
  - piaste 4y ago
    Their secret sauce is "we have a Borg Cube's worth of datacenters, so we can run the same code as you at a lower price". The AGPL does nothing to prevent that. They aren't modifying Akka, they're just running it on a superior platform. One license that does force the giants to share (the software part of) their secret sauce exists and is called SSPL, the one the MongoDB guys came up with.
    - yawaramin 4y ago
      > One license that does force the giants to share (the software part of) their secret sauce exists and is called SSPL That's exactly what the AGPL does. You just claimed it doesn't prevent cloud providers from running the software at low cost on their own datacentres.

cardanome 4y ago

Companies like Amazon offering open source software as a hosting service can out-compete any other companies offering the same just based on market position. Liberal open source licenses are the perfect weapon for the monopolists because they ensure an "equal" playing field, meaning they have access to the same tech that smaller companies have. All things being equal, they can always crush the competition with their market position.

arinlen 4y ago
> Companies like Amazon offering open source software as a hosting service can out-compete any other companies offering the same just based on market position. Can you please explain exactly what's wrong with that? I mean, the whole point of FLOSS is to ensure everyone has the right to access, fix, and alter the software. Why do you feel anyone's revenue is relevant? > Liberal open source licenses are the perfect weapon for the monopolists because they ensure an "equal" playing field, meaning they have access to the same tech that smaller companies have. Your comment makes zero sense. FLOSS is about ensuring the right to use, fix, and alter software. It's not about people with a axe to grind about competitors providing a better service. The only weapon I see here is people trying to abuse the concept of FLOSS to complain about their inability to profit from other people's software because others do a better job.
- cardanome 4y ago
  > about competitors providing a better service The point is you can NOT outcompete Amazon on that as a smaller company. They have economics of scale on their side, brand recognition, marketing budget, the whole AWS ecosystem that locks developers in. Even if you offered a better and cheaper service (which is not really realistic) then most customers would stick to AWS because they are hosting everything else on it and it is easier that working with multiple providers. Are you not aware how monopolists work?
  - zozbot234 4y ago
    And yet there's plenty of competition in the network infrastructure market, including by smaller players. You think DigitalOcean and Hetzner are not in a closely related market to AWS or Azure?
  - arinlen 4y ago
    > The point is you can NOT outcompete Amazon on that as a smaller company. It looks to me that AWS only has around 30% of the cloud market, and CloudFlare is outcompeting AWS in some market segments oddly enough due to things like CloudFlare Worker's, which are developed from the V8 engine which is as FLOSS as it gets. It looks like behind the thin veil of a badly formed "unfair competition" argument, there's only an irrational concern that revenue should be tied to rights to access software developed by a third-party.
    - Dylan16807 4y ago
      I think "smaller" there is supposed to mean "on the small end" and not a direct comparison to Amazon. CloudFlare is not an example of such a company. > irrational concern that revenue should be tied to rights to access software developed by a third-party It's the rational concern that major developers of widely-used software should be paid.
- piaste 4y ago
  > The whole point of FLOSS is to ensure everyone has the right to access, fix, and alter the software. Why do you feel anyone's revenue is relevant? Not being relevant isn't the same as not being important. The aims of FLOSS are good thing, and they are successfully achieved when every computer in the world runs 100% FLOSS code. But if all code is FLOSS, then the cloud giants can sleep unchallenged, because they have the best machines to run the same code as everybody else. This is an entirely unintended side-effect. If you consider it an undesirable side-effect as well (and I do), the BSL and similar licenses are a reasonable next step. They preserve the social benefits of open source licenses, while leaving room for upstarts to build a small moat to challenge the cloud giants' gigantic ones.
  - yawaramin 4y ago
    > They preserve the social benefits of open source licenses What benefits? By not being FLOSS they just removed most of the rights and freedoms that users would have with the software.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    - piaste 4y ago
      I don't think this level of absolutism is justified. I think that it's a stretch to define cloud providers as "users" in the first place: What is Akka? A distributed messaging platform. If you want to use Akka to move messages, then the SSPL is just like the AGPL to you. (Even if you're Amazon! No discrimination against trillion-dollar companies!) If you want to use Akka and Akka's code to learn how messaging work, then the SSPL is just like the AGPL to you. If you want to use Akka's code as a starting point to author your custom messaging platform, then the SSPL is just like the AGPL to you. When is it not like the AGPL to you? Only when you don't want to actually use Akka yourself, but you want to charge others a fee to let them use Akka on your server. In that case, and only in that case, SSPL says "you are not a user of this program and are not entitled to the Four Freedoms". I find myself in agreement with that assessment. EDIT: I originally mentioned the BSL in this thread, that was a mistake. The BSL (free except for users >$25M) is a non-free license that I consider legitimate and understandable and better than almost any other non-free license, but less than ideal. The SSPL (free except for cloud providers) is the non-free license that I find most acceptable, to the point where I think AGPL projects will make the world a better place by switching to the SSPL.

piaste 4y ago

The cloud giants have gigantic moats in terms of infrastructure, marketing, process, and so on. Traditionally, one of the best paths for an upstart company to challenge an established giant was to develop superior technology. Indeed, this is how some of the cloud giants themselves got their start against the dinosaurs of the day. But in a tech culture where open source is not just common but expected, this path is severely hampered. A lot of tech users won't even consider your fancy new technology if it isn't open source, but if it is, then the giants can put it on their platform and make your customers into theirs. This is what "Microsoft loves open source" means. When they had the (commercially) superior tech, they disparaged open source as nonsense so they wouldn't be asked to share. Twenty years later, when they realized that there was more and better tech out there than they could hope to produce, they aligned and supported that very ideology so that "we have Redis" or "we have Akka" wouldn't be a competitive advantage anymore. Ultimately, it's a twist on the old "commodify your competition".

josephcsible 4y ago
> if it is, then the giants can put it on their platform and make your customers into theirs. The AGPL already solves this. Whatever secret sauce the giants add to do that, you can just take it and add it back to your original program.
- piaste 4y ago
  Their secret sauce is "we have a Borg Cube's worth of datacenters, so we can run the same code as you at a lower price". The AGPL does nothing to prevent that. They aren't modifying Akka, they're just running it on a superior platform. One license that does force the giants to share (the software part of) their secret sauce exists and is called SSPL, the one the MongoDB guys came up with.
  - yawaramin 4y ago
    > One license that does force the giants to share (the software part of) their secret sauce exists and is called SSPL That's exactly what the AGPL does. You just claimed it doesn't prevent cloud providers from running the software at low cost on their own datacentres.