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Comment by iblaine | Hacker News Reader

Even if cloud providers give back more than they take, there nothing legally stopping them from stealing an open source project as their own. The Business Source License (BSL) seems like a good reaction. What Amazon did to confluent.io and so many others seems pretty cold hearted.

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Stealing an open source project would be like saying stealing quick sort. You can't steal something if it was given to the public domain.

> Stealing an open source project would be like saying stealing quick sort. You can't steal something if it was given to the public domain.

Most open source projects are not given to the public domain, but encumbered with clauses in the form of their license.

Permissive licenses are basically public domain with some attribution clauses and litigation indemnity.

And none of the companies are breaching the license.

Quicksort is an algorithm, a copyright on it would not hold up, but a creative use of it may hold up. Kafka is not part of the public domain, but available through an open source license, that AWS is arguably exploiting to make some money off the back of open source contributors.

True, but for all intents and purposes, it's basically public domain with some attribution clauses and litigation indemnity:

"Grant of Copyright License. Subject to the terms and conditions of this License, each Contributor hereby grants to You a perpetual, worldwide, non-exclusive, no-charge, royalty-free, irrevocable copyright license to reproduce, prepare Derivative Works of, publicly display, publicly perform, sublicense, and distribute the Work and such Derivative Works in Source or Object form."

https://github.com/apache/kafka/blob/trunk/LICENSE#L67-L72

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