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> 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 e

by 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.
      - CuriousCosmic 2y ago
        > Why would you need Hosting, Deployment help, LTS release When you are buying a "one click" aws managed service? You wouldn't however I was listing them for completeness-sake because they are common strategies employed by FOSS maintainer companies and there's still a market for them outside of the AWS world. > Are feature or bug bounties even applicable if you have to wait an unknown amount of time for it to reach you via AWS? That can actually end up being a selling point for moving off the AWS version. If you can effectively "advertise" that and a company really needs a specific feature for their product, that might give them the justification to jump ship to the non-AWS version of the product. > I'm merely suggesting THAT copyleft doesn't provide you any protection here and WHY that is potentially problematic. Oh for sure. However I would maybe say that it offers limited protection here (mainly offering protection in other ways) rather than none at all. And that can definitely be problematic no doubt but nowadays I think companies are a lot more hesitant on blindly lumping everything onto AWS compared to 5 or 10 years ago so I'd like to believe that AWS' authority in deciding what is and isn't a viable product is declining in the space.

by ericb 2y ago

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.
    - CuriousCosmic 2y ago
      > Why would you need Hosting, Deployment help, LTS release When you are buying a "one click" aws managed service? You wouldn't however I was listing them for completeness-sake because they are common strategies employed by FOSS maintainer companies and there's still a market for them outside of the AWS world. > Are feature or bug bounties even applicable if you have to wait an unknown amount of time for it to reach you via AWS? That can actually end up being a selling point for moving off the AWS version. If you can effectively "advertise" that and a company really needs a specific feature for their product, that might give them the justification to jump ship to the non-AWS version of the product. > I'm merely suggesting THAT copyleft doesn't provide you any protection here and WHY that is potentially problematic. Oh for sure. However I would maybe say that it offers limited protection here (mainly offering protection in other ways) rather than none at all. And that can definitely be problematic no doubt but nowadays I think companies are a lot more hesitant on blindly lumping everything onto AWS compared to 5 or 10 years ago so I'd like to believe that AWS' authority in deciding what is and isn't a viable product is declining in the space.