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Comment by catern | Hacker News Reader

The server side license stuff doesn't prevent shared hosting providers from using software. It just requires hosting providers to open source their infrastructure.

I think the internet would be even better today, if shared hosting providers had been sharing infrastructure technology since 25 years ago.

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I think that's missing the forest for the trees. The license is designed to prevent hosting providers from selling the software as a service to their customers. The requirement to open source their entire infrastructure and operations is just a means to do that.

Technically it doesn't just prevent from selling SaaS. It prevents from selling SaaS without having the consent of the open source project first, which means negotiating a deal.

The value in AWS is not the software. (What I heard about it a few years ago it's very explicitly not the cobbled together software.) It's the whole enterprise, the structure, the teams, the operations staff.

I don't think sspl is realistic to be able to comply with. This clause is ridiculously wide:

> 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.

I mean... there's very obviously a limit, right? You don't use an infinite number of programs. And it's not "all programs you use", it's "all programs that you use to make the Program ... available as a service". You don't need to provide the code for Microsoft Solitare, but you do need to provide the code for Apache httpd and your Linux distro. Which is pretty easy to do!

If there is any limit it's certainly not very obvious. For example if you manage/develop the service from your Macbook then are you using macOS "to make the Program available as a service"? And the rabbit hole just keeps going deeper. Running it on EC2 or ESXi? Whoops. Wrote any ad-hoc shell scripts? Better have them archived. What about all the firmwares and driver blobs, are those also programs that are used? ?

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.

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