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It is strange that cloud providers don't give back to open source. Even 1% of revenues would likely adequately fund teams. However, the aren't the only ones tha

It is strange that cloud providers don't give back to open source. Even 1% of revenues would likely adequately fund teams. However, the aren't the only ones that are being "greedy". Eventually, someone will try to become a billionaire from a popular project (either the original creator or someone else). Capturing a fraction of revenue isn't enough for these folks. I feel that a new license model is needed to incentivize better behaviors on all sides.

gavinhoward 3y ago
I have a model: https://gavinhoward.com/2023/12/is-source-available-really-that-bad/ https://gavinhoward.com/2023/12/is-source-available-really-t... . Other people will have to decide whether it is a better model.
xign 3y ago
I don't think it's strange to be honest. Like, if you make your code available under a permissive license like BSD, it's… permissive. Companies don't have a moral or ethical or legal obligation to contribute back. AWS saw an available software, and did what they do and packaged it up and offered a service. Does it suck for Redis? Sure. But they shouldn't have used BSD license to begin with. There's a reason why FSF spent so much time focusing on their license (not that I'm saying everyone should be using copyleft license). A charitable interpretation is that Redis was being naive. A more realistic interpretation is that Redis knew a proprietary license would not have allowed it to be widely adopted, and that only a standard permissive license would have allowed it to be adopted, and now that it's popular they can force a change due to inertia on developers' side. I just think something like Redis has no place being open source. And we should just be honest about it instead of beating around the bush. This whole "we will spend our R&D making a free software and make money on hosting" never had any legs because the obvious conclusion is someone can also make money on hosting your software without having put in the R&D work. If yet another new company comes to the market saying "we love open source" we should just be skeptical. The business model likely just doesn't make sense in the long run.

gavinhoward 3y ago

I have a model: https://gavinhoward.com/2023/12/is-source-available-really-that-bad/ https://gavinhoward.com/2023/12/is-source-available-really-t... . Other people will have to decide whether it is a better model.

xign 3y ago

I don't think it's strange to be honest. Like, if you make your code available under a permissive license like BSD, it's… permissive. Companies don't have a moral or ethical or legal obligation to contribute back. AWS saw an available software, and did what they do and packaged it up and offered a service. Does it suck for Redis? Sure. But they shouldn't have used BSD license to begin with. There's a reason why FSF spent so much time focusing on their license (not that I'm saying everyone should be using copyleft license). A charitable interpretation is that Redis was being naive. A more realistic interpretation is that Redis knew a proprietary license would not have allowed it to be widely adopted, and that only a standard permissive license would have allowed it to be adopted, and now that it's popular they can force a change due to inertia on developers' side. I just think something like Redis has no place being open source. And we should just be honest about it instead of beating around the bush. This whole "we will spend our R&D making a free software and make money on hosting" never had any legs because the obvious conclusion is someone can also make money on hosting your software without having put in the R&D work. If yet another new company comes to the market saying "we love open source" we should just be skeptical. The business model likely just doesn't make sense in the long run.