They have a problem with their business model, then. License changes to a formerly open source project are costly. The community reacts very strongly when license terms change after they've come to depend on a product, and they should.
Why do we apply this standard to MongoDB but not to Apache, Linux, Postgres, or MariaDB? One purpose of an open source license is to allow many providers to provide the service. As I've talked about here previously, Elasticsearch wasn't able to provide the service I needed, so I had to move to AWS.
It's weird to me that the Hacker News community doesn't think that sort of competition is good. The narrative seems to be that all these businesses are somehow victims of AWS, when it seems the truth is much more straightforward: they provided open source software and people used it. The fact that their business had no working plan to actually monetize that foundation should not be taken out on the community.
I can't? I mean, if Amazon does commercial version of Elastic better than Elastic themselves then so be it. I don't see how one company is entitled to turn an open source project into business and the other is not.
I do see issues with monopolies pushing inferior products onto users. But that would be a completely different issue, nothing to do with open source.
I mean it’s a free country either way then. Elastic can change the licensing and Amazon is then free to compete with a fork of the software pre-licensing change.
Amazon doesn’t really have a leg to stand on in objection here. Building a platform to re-sell an open source project may end up fracturing that open source community’s user base, that’s a consequence of their own actions.
> I don't see how one company is entitled to turn an open source project into business and the other is not.
According to the original license they are both entitled to do that, that's the problem. Do you think it's sustainable for one company to make the software for free and another one to sell it for profit?
They both sell it for profit, but Amazon doesn’t contribute changes upstream, so the public + rest of the industry won’t benefit from their work. It’s not an equivalence.
Are you sure that's the case with AGPL? Cause they can sue them and enforce the contribution. I doubt that's the case. And those who went with MIT/BSD openly allow distribution without contribution.
Why isn't this a problem for other databases then? I'm sure most cloud sell some MariaDB services. Why would they be able to profit from it?
It's because the business model for ES is direct competition with AWS and others, and they got out competed. So they had to play licenses games to try and level the field.
> Why isn't this a problem for other databases then?
It is?
- MongoDB went from AGPL to SSPL
- Redis went from BSD to SSPL
- Elasticsearch went from AGPL to SSPL
- CockroachDB went from Apache to BSL
- TimescaleDB went from Apache to Apache + TLS
- Graylog went from GPL to SSPL
> It's because the business model for ES is direct competition with AWS and others, and they got out competed. So they had to play licenses games to try and level the field.
That's why intellectual property law exist. If I spent years writing a book and you were allowed to copy it and sell it then obviously you're going to "out compete" me by default. You didn't incur any costs in producing the thing you're selling, duh!
Yes and the result is these databases got forked, and the community got rightfully mad.
But other databases don't need it, and stayed truly open source, because their business model doesn't rely on being the only hosting provider.
> You didn't incur any costs in producing the thing you're selling, duh!
Indeed, you gave it away for free, saying I could sell it... It doesn't take a business genius to know AWS can undercut your hosting services.
It goes to show that most of these companies don't really care about open source. They cared more about making money and open source was a useful facade to get people to contribute for free.
Who's pretending? If I share something with everyone for any purpose except one specific purpose that's endangering my project's existence that's not "pretending".
And even that's overstating it because there's no prohibition of any kind. Cloud providers are free to use SSPL licensed software as long as they release all associated platform code.
Competition would mean Amazon creating their own software. Taking software others made and using your monopoly eco-system and scale to drive the original creator out of the game kills the product.
Many support breaking up Amazon so others could compete not killing small entities and growing Amazon.
> Taking software others made and using your monopoly eco-system and scale to drive the original creator out of the game kills the product
They took software that others gave away for free without restriction and did what they wanted with it. It took time but the community figured out this exploit path and patched it in subsequent license versions.
One could argue it was not given away for free, but with a silent expectation of reciprocity. Using open-source is a gentleman's agreement to be respectful towards the project, a good citizen, not to abuse and potentially contribute.
But you're right communities are now having to concoct a wild-growing collection of semi open-source licenses to protect themselves from abuse by a few big players.
They knew what they were doing. They released OSS to build traction and a community. In some cases, the community contributed quite a lot to the quality of the software - even if not a lot of code. It never would have gained any traction or interest from enterprise buyers without that. Then that valuable software they had already given away was used to build a business that couldn’t create enough value on top of it.
The only people with any justification for hurt feelings are the community contributors.
AWS literally paid for developers for the redis project, including the salary of core members. It's not like they didn't contribute back to the community.
They pay for a lot more open source work than that as well, but they also don't get to make any special claims for doing that. None of it is charity - it is simply in the collective interest of a lot of tech companies to commoditize and share the costs of infrastructure software. Even shaming freeloaders is uncalled for and against the ethos of OSS, which is sort of implied in making your statement.
It's not just Amazon, it's also smaller providers like Dreamhost, which I've been using for 20 years. I feel like people are in favor of killing the hosting ecosystem so that we can support businesses that didn't have a working plan to monetize their open source offering.
That's a risk they knowingly chose to accept when they opted for FOSS licensing. It's not as if people hadn't asked "Well, what if another party tries to fork our open source code for profit?" all the way back when FOSS was starting to gain traction in the 1990s.
Free Software was designed to avoid this, and has become stricter as the technology changed. Open Source was deliberately designed to thwart this. The entire intention of it was to allow businesses to resell work that was done for free. When you fork Free Software, your fork is also Free Software.
Free Software licenses don't restrict profit making, even the AGPL wouldn't stop Amazon from using the same strategy to beat those OSS companies in the market.
That is incorrect, the FSF licenses would require Amazon contribute code forward to their users, not back to the project.
Also, Amazon were already contributing code back when these companies changed their licenses, the companies don't care about code contributions, just money.
> OSS licensing. Free Software was designed to avoid this
This is pretty much a distinction without a difference. There are licences that qualify as one but not the other (per the FSF and OSI's determinations), but none are in widespread use.
> When you fork Free Software, your fork is also Free Software.
That would be copyleft. [0] Not all Free Software licences are copyleft licences.
Original creator business model relies on extracting free labor from community. It backfired and they changed the license. They abuse contributors by betraying their trust and changing the license after AWS abused their business model. No good guys here.
The GPL has no effect on this issue. For service providers like AWS, who provide the service not the software, the GPL doesn't require them to do anything differently than with more permissive licenses.
I think the GPL has become somewhat obsolete because of this causing it create to completely nonsensical scenarios. For instance I can't comply with the GPL and add vanilla Stockfish (the currently strongest chess engine, licensed under GPL) to a chess app released on the Apple store, yet somebody can slightly modify the engine, keep all those modifications proprietary, and sell access to the engine on the same App store, without source access, so long as the computer is done through a middle-man server instead of being done locally.
The GPL no longer suffices to maintain the spirit of intent of the GPL. Like a peer comment mentioned it seems (??) that AGPL is their update to resolve this.
Some courts [which?] have read things into open source licenses that aren't actually there, usually on the side of the user because that's obviously what the people who wrote the licenses intended. It's not impossible that GPL could force Amazon to give out their software.
Selling support/services as the maintainer of an open-source service was never a hard-nosed business proposition in the first place. It's like Amazon undercutting your fire station's bake sale.
There are passive open source projects done by people out of love in their spare time over the years and then there are active open source projects done by people with the idea of executing in the open space and building a community around it. The later has business incentives tied around it and I guess the challenge is that there isnt a clear structure which leads to this situation.
agreed. i’m no aws apologist but if you’re going to try to monetize open source and then complain when someone else does it more efficiently/effectively, it really feels disingenuous. “we were going to do that, but they got there first. it’s not fair.”
i’m only familiar with the postgres side, but it seems like a more nuanced view of this debate would be to discuss aws monetizing open source relative to their upstream, community-beneficial contributions.
Sure. CFOs optimise for fewer vendor relationships; fewer invoices, fewer things to talk about during compliance, less reconciliation overhead. Consolidated spend also improves their negotiating position. So when AWS offers good-enough Elasticsearch bundled into an existing relationship, it wins regardless of whether the original is better supported or better value.
"More efficiently" means procurement efficiency, not operational efficiency. They're not the same thing.
As someone who has had to deal with vendor management at a financial services company, I couldn't agree more.
We were going through a process to make vendor management more standardised and it reached a point where we couldn't even consider adding new vendors.
Adding new services to an existing vendor had minimal paperwork and approvals. As long as you had budget for it, you're unlikely to get any push back.
New vendors required tons of back and forth with legal. Infosec reviews. Additional costboards. Having to justify the vendor to multiple groups. Working out how you get them onboarded into the finance system. Once they're onboarded, we would then have additional paperwork to do periodic reviews to rate the vendor and make sure they're not a critical dependency that will bite us in the ass.
I've only worked with AWS and GCP, but they also throw training and credits at us, too. This could be personalised 2-day classroom events just for our company. There's a huge amount of perceived value for funnelling money through a cloud provider.
"They have a problem with their business model, then"
Ok, then don't be surprised when the most popular license becomes the FairSource license. Under this license, you have no rights, no ability to fork and no ability to modify, no ability to legally change the software in any way, but hey...you can see the source right. I feel like you don't understand the tragedy of the commons somehow.
That's a huge misrepresentation of fair source licenses. They prevent competing with the original vendor, but still try to retain Right to Repair as much as possible, for example:
> The Fair Core License, or FCL, is a mostly-permissive non-compete Fair Source license that eventually transitions to Open Source after 2 years.
The license is what I say it is when I release. You get no rights. You won't be able to fork. You won't be able to legally compile it. You get no rights. Because you have abused the trust of the devs. This is the new normal. Congrats on destroying one of the biggest sources of value in society. And nobody else using it will care because they aren't sociopaths that think they have the right to steal from others.
> aren't sociopaths that think they have the right to steal from others.
I cannot possibly fathom how you're getting from "I deployed some GPLv3 software as part of my hosting service" to "sociopath that think(s) they have a right to steal from others."
Copyright, by default, reserves all rights for the author. The authors then chose to license under a license that explicitly gives all those rights back, and when users leverage those rights, it is being cast as theft. That's...not coherent.
These companies want it both ways: open-source to gain traction, closed-source to monetize. In other areas, we call this "enshittification", and that's what it is here, too.
We are supportive of 3rd party ink cartridges, and there's little concern for the business model of the printer manufacturers. We instead care about the rights of the folks using the printers.
With Postgres, no one bats an eye that there are thousands of hosting companies providing Postgres as an offering, and they give nothing back to the project. Same with Apache, Nextcloud, Linux, Nginx, Sqlite, and thousands of other pieces of open-source software. Are folks against hosting companies like https://yunohost.org/?
It's only when (1) the software is open-source, and (2) the entity behind it doesn't know how to sustain itself with open-source, that we suddenly change positions and view the project as a victim. This doesn't happen with printers, it doesn't happen with other open source software. I'm not even against a change in the license, but claiming that AWS is evil for doing this doesn't track.
A lot of those projects are not companies selling software. They're effectively public infrastructure projects, often governed by non-profit foundations or community institutions.
Also, many of them predate hyperscalers and developed governance/economic structures that make them harder for AWS to capture or destabilize, whereas AWS free-riding a vendor-controlled project can destroy the economic engine sustaining the project itself.
Quite ironically, the only example from your list that doesn't predate hyperscalers (Nextcloud) is fundamentally a self-hosting/federation product. It exists largely as an alternative to hyperscaler-native platforms, not as a cloud primitive AWS can easily commoditise into its own stack.
So, treating PostgreSQL, Linux, Elasticsearch and Nextcloud as interchangeable "open source projects" ignores the completely different institutional and economic realities behind the projects.
Indeed! I just don't think it's on Amazon to fix those institutional and economic realities when they decide to host a project that people find useful.
Companies that provide offerings that are open-source, and then later stop offering open-source updates are not a "golden goose". Organizations that produce open-source need to have a funding model that isn't "charging for hosting". Hosting can certainly be part of it, but there also needs to be a larger strategy. Framing those that don't have one as victims of Amazon ignores the company's culpability for offering the product as open-source in the first place.
If printers were free, and ink was free or open, and the printer company said "don't operate a printer leasing business, that's the only thing you can't do", I would side with the printer company.
It's a hypothetical, we don't need that level of complication. And a software company could start with such a license and then that part disappears.
But even if we factor that in, we have to remember it only applies to new models and it's only being added because some megacorporation stepped in, so that's not getting me to change sides.
That's the desired outcome of competition but the effects can go all over the place and the second-order effects in fragile towns can matter more than the price drop. As an extreme example, some people may lose their jobs, local spending may fall, some small shops may close and Aldi may pull out too, so everybody loses (here's [0] as an approximate example).
Usually a community can tolerate changes only when it's not already near the bottom. When you're near the bottom, almost any destabilisation can kill your little system.
Arguably the town is at fault for choosing to permit Walmart to open in their town in that analogy. If you want to control the negative externalities of capitalism you can't just expect to not provide regulations and hope things will work out.
Even if it weren't AWS, someone else with enough determination could use the same open source code to create a compelling alternative taking away business from the original authors. Trying to use social norms to make people not do that is not effective. You need mechanisms that can be enforced via legal procedures to be effective.
"It's weird to me that the Hacker News community doesn't think that sort of competition is good."
It's not 'competition'.
It's carnivorous, predatory.
Consider shifting gears and seeing all of this through the lens of 'power'.
There is no such thing as open/free markets when there is massive power asymmetry.
Anything that a weaker entity produces, will be 'taken' by a more powerful entity via all sorts of mechanisms.
The 'point' of IP/Open Sources liscencing can be whatever anyone wants it to be ...
but consider this: if the 'game' is on a tilted field, then almost all of the economic value goes into the hands of those with the power to reap the surplus - not the creator.
The 'owner' is who has power.
The Kings didn't rule by arbitrary decree - their money came from owning all the land. It doesn't matter how hard you work, how hard you innovate, how much surplus you create - if the landlord says 'I want all of that' and you have no choice.
Your Rent = All The Value of the Stuff You Create with a bit leftover for you to survive.
That is entirely done through legal ownership - not through some kind of forceful cocercion.
Control of distribution, access to financing, entrenched supplier / buyer relationships, barriers to entry, regulatory capture, economies of scale - all of that makes some systems unassailable without some degree of power.
Purely through the lens of power - Open Source is like 'commoditizing' a tiny little part of the system, where the surpluses will get pulled in by the most powerful entity.
In this case: Amazon.
Anyone writing software and 'making it free' - that Amazon can use - is working for Amazon for free.
Again: if you want to see it way.
If you just like 'making stuff' that's perfectly fine as well.
But - the moment you see this as a 'means to income' - then - it's a 'power dynamic'.
This is why better/smarter IP laws should help smaller players.
The whole point of these things is to try to enable actual competition - which is not 'feed David to Goliath' - its supposed to give David a chance.
The 'changing of license terms' by some small vendors is the result of Amazon suffocating them - it's the power system finding it's 'equilibrium' - where the 'creators' are snuffed out - or 'better yet for Amazon' keep working for free.
And for society as a whole, we are getting to a state where corporations have incredibly large amount of money and gradually, hard power too. OSS is kind of small rebellion that we need to sustain so that we don't that tiny bit of freedom we have.
P.S. I think East India Company's history should be a mandatory lesson for everyone on the ability of a single company to take over a subcontinent. At its peak they had their own army, ruthless efficiency due to a largely meritocratic structure, and was successful in taking over multiple kingdoms.
Why do we apply this standard to MongoDB but not to Apache, Linux, Postgres, or MariaDB? One purpose of an open source license is to allow many providers to provide the service. As I've talked about here previously, Elasticsearch wasn't able to provide the service I needed, so I had to move to AWS.
It's weird to me that the Hacker News community doesn't think that sort of competition is good. The narrative seems to be that all these businesses are somehow victims of AWS, when it seems the truth is much more straightforward: they provided open source software and people used it. The fact that their business had no working plan to actually monetize that foundation should not be taken out on the community.