The problem is with the BSD licenses where people can take and not give back. It’s not a matter of who gets paid - but whether the primary beneficiaries are giving back their source code. They are the ones most incentivized to write new code.
The problem is with the BSD licenses where people can take and not give back. It’s not a matter of who gets paid - but whether the primary beneficiaries are giving back their source code. They are the ones most incentivized to write new code.
The controversy is not that some companies migrate to GPL or AGPL licenses but that some companies want to take a two sided contributor/maintainer relationship and turn it into an one sided contract by adding clauses that lets them prevent forking the core into product that compete with their own proprietary derivatives, which no OSI aproved license does.
As the FSF did actually release open source license that deal with the issue of cloud providers forking an opensource project without contributing code back in 2002(the actual current AGPLv2 license is from 2007) it's nonsense to say that you cannot close that hole with a OSI approved license.
It seems the convenience of hosting services on the same infrastructure you already run everything else on (the cloud) outstrips the value of the trademark. This is new uncharted territory. So while it was always allowed by the license - in practice it was not as big a problem as it is today.
The hosting providers have always absorbed a huge amount of the revenue from opensource web infrastructure without a direct payment line back to the trademark holder, as companies like SUSE and RedHat acts as successful middlemen and co-developers of a lot of frameworks they don't have the trademark on.
The idea that owning a trademark on an opensource project entitle you to the bulk of the revenue started in the VC circus about a decade ago prior to that you did it for other reasons or as a part of an consultancy operation in collaboration with a wider community. The OpenSource by license but build by a single company model expecting to operate on the shareware model of the 1980ies PC industry is what's new not the existence of non-paying hosting companies or large enterprises as potential rivals for support revenue.