"GPL, however, is nearly useless in the cloud." Only as a commercial weapon (which was never the intent) - for other readers, MySQL is dual licensedm and it's

"GPL, however, is nearly useless in the cloud." Only as a commercial weapon (which was never the intent) - for other readers, MySQL is dual licensedm and it's possible to use it already without being subject to the GPL, obviously. There wasn't much pickup for Affero, all told. In many ways, it's nicer, because people who are not distributing apps are more likely to use GPL applications (though if they understand linkage, they shouldn't fear it anyway). License choices are not that important. There are definitely ways to build proprietary application components without requiring GPL. (i.e. solutions around a GPL application that don't require directly extending the core of it with proprietary bits). Numerous examples. The other model is basically building something that is a software consultancy / helpdesk / services org. And that's a lot of what Red Hat is. Today, it seems many more projects are actually going full Apache. Because it's easy to extend something, it's not declining. It's accelerating. If you make your own extensions to something and don't get them upstream, you lose the advantage of being able to consume easily what happens upstream. And that upstream development is increasingly funded by people who work at companies using those solutions - or selling them. Cloud just makes everything to deploy faster and on even larger scale; being able to host something behind a .com in pre-widescale-cloud days was still a thing.