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AGPL or other copyleft licences don't stop amazon taking "your" product and hosting it for less than your own hosted offering as they don't have to pay the deve

by matt-p 2y ago

AGPL or other copyleft licences don't stop amazon taking "your" product and hosting it for less than your own hosted offering as they don't have to pay the developers. "Then it shouldn't be open source" - Yes, true and I agree. But source available, with a bit of a community in github/discord and opportunity to host the code yourself free for small use cases, read the code and raise PRs is WAY BETTER than a fully closed source product. How do we standardise that in a similar way we have done with open source licenses?

CuriousCosmic 2y ago
> AGPL or other copyleft licences don't stop amazon taking "your" product and hosting it for less than your own hosted offering as they don't have to pay the developers. It doesn't but I don't think I've seen Amazon being cheaper than other hosting options, especially after IO costs. What AGPL does stop is Amazon writing improvements, extensions, and integrations for your product and then refusing to make them public in a way they can be upstreamed. That's the bigger issue. Competing on hosting price or on maintenance/support contracts against Amazon generally is going to favor the smaller party because of the AWS tax. Competing against a city's worth of engineers improving a closed source downstream of your product however is going to be a losing battle. AGPL fixes that.
- ericb 2y ago
  > Competing on hosting price or on maintenance/support contracts against Amazon generally is going to favor the smaller party because of the AWS tax. This is exactly backwards, because of how corporate procurement works. Large companies--the ones with money--have a whole process around working with new vendors. It can take months to setup. A security review, audit, and legal are likely to be involved. Or, they all already have a contract with amazon and can start using the Amazon service providing X immediately. From CTO to audit, risk, accounting, and compliance, everyone's life is easier if they use one vendor for everything, rather than 10.
  - CuriousCosmic 2y ago
    That may be true but that's a very different discussion than discussion on competing over cost. Larger companies are willing to eat a higher cost for the sake of bureaucratic and logistic simplicity.
    - matt-p 2y ago
      For the purposes of the point I was making and this discussion it doesn't really matter if it's market dominance or cost. The point is big established vendor free-riding on the work a smaller company has done, potentially extinguishing or significantly damaging it and by extention the future of the project.
      - CuriousCosmic 2y ago
        Of course that can be problematic still but I don't see how they can extinguish the founding company when you are working with a license like the AGPL (with proprietary dual licensing). They are still the upstream and "parasitic downstreams" have very limited opportunities to build trenches with such a strong copyleft in play. The upstream can provide: - Hosting (as mentioned before) or assisting in managing colocated infra. - Proprietary Licensure for more permissive uses (as mentioned before). - Support/Security contracts for LTS/Enterprise releases. - Bug & Feature Bounties for priority changes (or a "hire our engineer" type system). - Contracting and consulting services for companies building on top of their product. That's just naming a few but there are plenty of ways to build out a reliable income base for a popular open source product as long as you pick the right licensing early on.
        matt-p 2y ago
        Why would you need Hosting, Deployment help, LTS release When you are buying a "one click" aws managed service? Are feature or bug bounties even applicable if you have to wait an unknown amount of time for it to reach you via AWS? I'm merely suggesting THAT copyleft doesn't provide you any protection here and WHY that is potentially problematic.

by matt-p 2y ago

CuriousCosmic 2y ago

> AGPL or other copyleft licences don't stop amazon taking "your" product and hosting it for less than your own hosted offering as they don't have to pay the developers. It doesn't but I don't think I've seen Amazon being cheaper than other hosting options, especially after IO costs. What AGPL does stop is Amazon writing improvements, extensions, and integrations for your product and then refusing to make them public in a way they can be upstreamed. That's the bigger issue. Competing on hosting price or on maintenance/support contracts against Amazon generally is going to favor the smaller party because of the AWS tax. Competing against a city's worth of engineers improving a closed source downstream of your product however is going to be a losing battle. AGPL fixes that.

ericb 2y ago
> Competing on hosting price or on maintenance/support contracts against Amazon generally is going to favor the smaller party because of the AWS tax. This is exactly backwards, because of how corporate procurement works. Large companies--the ones with money--have a whole process around working with new vendors. It can take months to setup. A security review, audit, and legal are likely to be involved. Or, they all already have a contract with amazon and can start using the Amazon service providing X immediately. From CTO to audit, risk, accounting, and compliance, everyone's life is easier if they use one vendor for everything, rather than 10.
- CuriousCosmic 2y ago
  That may be true but that's a very different discussion than discussion on competing over cost. Larger companies are willing to eat a higher cost for the sake of bureaucratic and logistic simplicity.
  - matt-p 2y ago
    For the purposes of the point I was making and this discussion it doesn't really matter if it's market dominance or cost. The point is big established vendor free-riding on the work a smaller company has done, potentially extinguishing or significantly damaging it and by extention the future of the project.
    - CuriousCosmic 2y ago
      Of course that can be problematic still but I don't see how they can extinguish the founding company when you are working with a license like the AGPL (with proprietary dual licensing). They are still the upstream and "parasitic downstreams" have very limited opportunities to build trenches with such a strong copyleft in play. The upstream can provide: - Hosting (as mentioned before) or assisting in managing colocated infra. - Proprietary Licensure for more permissive uses (as mentioned before). - Support/Security contracts for LTS/Enterprise releases. - Bug & Feature Bounties for priority changes (or a "hire our engineer" type system). - Contracting and consulting services for companies building on top of their product. That's just naming a few but there are plenty of ways to build out a reliable income base for a popular open source product as long as you pick the right licensing early on.
      - matt-p 2y ago
        Why would you need Hosting, Deployment help, LTS release When you are buying a "one click" aws managed service? Are feature or bug bounties even applicable if you have to wait an unknown amount of time for it to reach you via AWS? I'm merely suggesting THAT copyleft doesn't provide you any protection here and WHY that is potentially problematic.