Do you remember a time when there were hundreds of hosting providers? Do you remember WebHostingTalk where admins would go to check hosting offers from suppliers around the world?
The monopolies finished that era. So I don't think that software companies trying to adapt now can be seen through the lens of what was 15 years ago.
I heard a tidbit that I don't know if it's true or not but I would like to think it is. AWS has become so expensive for some companies that they're starting to migrate back to their own datacentres.
I have not come across a single founder in the last 5-6 years who does not start with AWS credits or is not craving for them.
AWS is nothing but monopoly and they have utilized access to their cash to buy early customers. The same goes for Google and MS. The smaller hosting providers that you believe exist actually are stuck with whatever customers they used to have or a chance new WordPress blog.
Now companies like Shopify is enabling people to run a shop without any ops for peanuts.
Or smaller SMB it environments, we run a small datacenter at my company running VMware software to run our customers domain controllers, erps, fileservers and such, though this is decreasing, we used to run Exchange too, but migrated every customer to Office365 because it's cheaper than on-premise licensing, and we have 0 ops. The fact that we're local means we can offer dark fibre to many customer sites, giving them 0ms latency to us, making even the chattiest shit system run like things were on their premises. I guess we're "computing at edge" :p
Not saying you're wrong that AWS is a cloud monopoly, but everyone isn't purchasing in the cloud market (the majority of the worlds money doesn't flow through startups going global). And there's also Azure which is growing at an incredible rate challenging AWS at migrating legacy workloads to the cloud.
Not saying you're wrong, but it's a multidimensional problem. One could argue AWS is nothing like shared hosting providers(compare scale), and a webserver is essentially "stateless" which means easier to build than say... A database holding sensitive information that doesn't break. I assume this is why postgres HA and horizontal scaling still really isn't a thing, while CockroachDB funded by VC "solved" this problem.
I think it's fair to let companies monetize on the service they built, while allowing people to run it on their own if they can. A problem here though is that the companies incentives mismatch the opensource project they're eunning. CockroachDB enterprise having killer features that the opensource version doesn't have and that noone will be able to PR because the company will reject it.
TimescaleDB went ahead and opensourced all their features, aligning their incentives with the project, but I don't know of anyone else who has done this.
I think the internet would be even better today, if shared hosting providers had been sharing infrastructure technology since 25 years ago.
> Corresponding Source for all programs that you use to make the Program or modified version available as a service
All programs you use
Every single one of them.
There is literally no limit on what sources you would need to publish. You don't need to think very long to realize how impossible that is.
Sure, you could probably fight it in courts to get some reasonable delineation. But the license itself is horribly vague. So the safe bet is to avoid it like plague. It's just not very well written license.
PHP + MySQL was the foundation of the Internet not so long ago , Wordpress is stil the backbone of lots of platform.
With SS License definitely this would not have been possible.