What do you think "weaponize open source" means? It doesn't look like it means a thing, and lounds like a poor attempt at shoehorning "weapon" in a discussion on how a potential user's income is something noteworthy.
Traditionally, one of the best paths for an upstart company to challenge an established giant was to develop superior technology. Indeed, this is how some of the cloud giants themselves got their start against the dinosaurs of the day.
But in a tech culture where open source is not just common but expected, this path is severely hampered. A lot of tech users won't even consider your fancy new technology if it isn't open source, but if it is, then the giants can put it on their platform and make your customers into theirs.
This is what "Microsoft loves open source" means. When they had the (commercially) superior tech, they disparaged open source as nonsense so they wouldn't be asked to share. Twenty years later, when they realized that there was more and better tech out there than they could hope to produce, they aligned and supported that very ideology so that "we have Redis" or "we have Akka" wouldn't be a competitive advantage anymore.
Ultimately, it's a twist on the old "commodify your competition".
The AGPL already solves this. Whatever secret sauce the giants add to do that, you can just take it and add it back to your original program.
The AGPL does nothing to prevent that. They aren't modifying Akka, they're just running it on a superior platform.
One license that does force the giants to share (the software part of) their secret sauce exists and is called SSPL, the one the MongoDB guys came up with.
That's exactly what the AGPL does. You just claimed it doesn't prevent cloud providers from running the software at low cost on their own datacentres.
The SSPL says that if they do so, they need to share the code they use to make it run as a service.
They still retain their massive hardware and organizational advantages, but it does mean that at least every user has access to the code to make their "Akka Service" as good as Amazon's.
Right, because they didn't change it. So what would there be to share anyway? 'Go to https://github.com/akka/akka'?
> but it does mean that at least every user has access to the code to make their "Akka Service" as good as Amazon's.
That code is meaningless. In this scenario we already established that Amazon is selling an unmodified copy of Akka as a Service (which, by the way, we will revisit this point later). And we already established, in your own words, that it's not about the code:
> Their secret sauce is "we have a Borg Cube's worth of datacenters, so we can run the same code as you at a lower price".
So what would the SSPL require, they publish their deployment scripts to their cloud datacentres? Like I said, that's meaningless.
> "Akka Service"
Final point. There's no such thing as an 'Akka Service'. Akka is a bunch of libraries. You link it into your JVM application. You don't run Akka separately, so by definition you can't offer it as a service (even if you're Amazon).
Hence my suggestion of AGPL, and heck let's be generous, let's add a commercial use exception for businesses with less than $20m revenue, similar to what they're doing now with the BSL. Except with my suggestion the software would stay as strong copyleft, most businesses would be happy with the commercial use exception, and a few would have to pay their fair share.
Also, when was the last time an “upstart” challenged a giant successfully?
- Microsoft has been a “giant” since 2000
- Apple became the worlds most valuable company in 2011.
- Google has been the go to search engine at least since the early 2000s
- Amazon has been dominant in its field at least since around 2000.
[1] Jassy is my skip^9 manager
[2] https://accelerationeconomy.com/cloud/amazon-shocker-ceo-jas...
I think you're thinking of "commodify your complement"? Commodifying your competition would seem to be a bad thing, as prices drop for something that substitutes for what you're selling. Might work in particular luxury/Veblen goods, but seems likely to be less of a thing? (and certainly a different thing than "commodify your complement")
https://www.lightbend.com/blog/low-cpu-utilization-fortune-5...
[1] As found on https://akka.io/
Liberal open source licenses are the perfect weapon for the monopolists because they ensure an "equal" playing field, meaning they have access to the same tech that smaller companies have. All things being equal, they can always crush the competition with their market position.
Can you please explain exactly what's wrong with that? I mean, the whole point of FLOSS is to ensure everyone has the right to access, fix, and alter the software. Why do you feel anyone's revenue is relevant?
> Liberal open source licenses are the perfect weapon for the monopolists because they ensure an "equal" playing field, meaning they have access to the same tech that smaller companies have.
Your comment makes zero sense. FLOSS is about ensuring the right to use, fix, and alter software. It's not about people with a axe to grind about competitors providing a better service.
The only weapon I see here is people trying to abuse the concept of FLOSS to complain about their inability to profit from other people's software because others do a better job.
The point is you can NOT outcompete Amazon on that as a smaller company. They have economics of scale on their side, brand recognition, marketing budget, the whole AWS ecosystem that locks developers in. Even if you offered a better and cheaper service (which is not really realistic) then most customers would stick to AWS because they are hosting everything else on it and it is easier that working with multiple providers.
Are you not aware how monopolists work?
It looks to me that AWS only has around 30% of the cloud market, and CloudFlare is outcompeting AWS in some market segments oddly enough due to things like CloudFlare Worker's, which are developed from the V8 engine which is as FLOSS as it gets.
It looks like behind the thin veil of a badly formed "unfair competition" argument, there's only an irrational concern that revenue should be tied to rights to access software developed by a third-party.
> irrational concern that revenue should be tied to rights to access software developed by a third-party
It's the rational concern that major developers of widely-used software should be paid.
Not being relevant isn't the same as not being important.
The aims of FLOSS are good thing, and they are successfully achieved when every computer in the world runs 100% FLOSS code.
But if all code is FLOSS, then the cloud giants can sleep unchallenged, because they have the best machines to run the same code as everybody else. This is an entirely unintended side-effect.
If you consider it an undesirable side-effect as well (and I do), the BSL and similar licenses are a reasonable next step. They preserve the social benefits of open source licenses, while leaving room for upstarts to build a small moat to challenge the cloud giants' gigantic ones.
What benefits? By not being FLOSS they just removed most of the rights and freedoms that users would have with the software.
What is Akka? A distributed messaging platform.
If you want to use Akka to move messages, then the SSPL is just like the AGPL to you. (Even if you're Amazon! No discrimination against trillion-dollar companies!)
If you want to use Akka and Akka's code to learn how messaging work, then the SSPL is just like the AGPL to you.
If you want to use Akka's code as a starting point to author your custom messaging platform, then the SSPL is just like the AGPL to you.
When is it not like the AGPL to you? Only when you don't want to actually use Akka yourself, but you want to charge others a fee to let them use Akka on your server.
In that case, and only in that case, SSPL says "you are not a user of this program and are not entitled to the Four Freedoms". I find myself in agreement with that assessment.
EDIT: I originally mentioned the BSL in this thread, that was a mistake. The BSL (free except for users >$25M) is a non-free license that I consider legitimate and understandable and better than almost any other non-free license, but less than ideal. The SSPL (free except for cloud providers) is the non-free license that I find most acceptable, to the point where I think AGPL projects will make the world a better place by switching to the SSPL.