Comment by piaste | Hacker News Reader

Comment by piaste | Hacker News Reader

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The cloud giants have gigantic moats in terms of infrastructure, marketing, process, and so on.

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".

First let’s put things in perspective. According to public statements last year by the former CEO of AWS and the current CEO of Amazon [1][2], only 5% of all IT spend is directed toward any cloud provider. There are plenty of opportunities with businesses that don’t host infrastructure in the cloud.

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 don't think that the Akka license change is aimed at cloud providers. Akka is a toolkit for building highly concurrent, distributed, and resilient message-driven applications for Java and Scala [1]. It's not possible for AWS to offer their own "Akka service" the way they offered Redis as ElastiCache. This change affects companies that build software using Akka. For example, here's a case study regarding an oilfield services company that uses Akka:

https://www.lightbend.com/blog/low-cpu-utilization-fortune-5...

[1] As found on https://akka.io/

> if it is, then the giants can put it on their platform and make your customers into theirs.

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.

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".

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.

> One license that does force the giants to share (the software part of) their secret sauce exists and is called SSPL

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 AGPL only covers modification to the software itself. So Amazon can take free code, sell it as a slickly-packaged service, and not need to share anything.

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.

> So Amazon can take free code, sell it as a slickly-packaged service, and not need to share anything.

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.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32751373

> Ultimately, it's a twist on the old "commodify your competition".

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")

You are quite correct, sorry for the typo.

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