Comment by lolinder | Hacker News Reader

Comment by lolinder | Hacker News Reader

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> that you can slap on a project without a legal team

The thing is, this kind of license is only really relevant to the kinds of projects that do have legal teams.

If you're writing a hobby project you probably shouldn't waste time worrying about feeding the AWS machine, because the odds that you'll get noticed and used are tiny. Just pick GPL or MIT and be done with it.

If you're participating in a large decentralized project like Postgres, then having a big player like Amazon providing managed hosting is actually a huge plus because you get lots of contributions from the big players [0]. There's very little downside for a project like this, and lots of upside.

The only type of FOSS project that needs an "AWS can't use this" license is a project that is driven by a single for-profit company which decided to make their business model "provide a managed solution layered on top of AWS". Unsurprisingly, it's hard to compete with AWS on price when you're using AWS itself as your vendor, so these companies tend to be the ones that switch licenses to tell AWS they're not allowed to compete.

These companies almost certainly have their own legal counsel and they represent a tiny minority of FOSS projects, so it's not obvious to me that we need a new standardized anti-AWS license. Maybe we should instead acknowledge that "managed-hosting-supported FOSS database" is an impossible business model and try something different next time.

[0] https://www.postgresql.org/community/contributors/

> The thing is, this kind of license is only really relevant to the kinds of projects that do have legal teams

So you want to advocate that every future database / infrastructure company needs to burn part of their runway to hire lawyers to do the repetitive work of making sure they can both try to be open and try to continue to exist? Plus we, the users, get to try to decode reams of legalese instead of using a convenient three-letter handle for an industry standard, like GPL or MIT? This does not seem ideal..

Please read to the end:

> Maybe we should instead acknowledge that "managed-hosting-supported FOSS database" is an impossible business model and try something different next time.

The business model these companies chose was fundamentally broken. It's only fundamentally broken for a specific class of backend tooling.

I believe that future database/infrastructure projects should continue to use the FOSS licenses we all know and love and find a sustainability model that works without compromising the freedoms that make free software free. Postgres, Linux, SQLite, the BSDs, and many other projects in similar spaces have led the way.

People need to make money somehow. Developers who spend years creating, maintaining, and continually improving an open source database (or other project) used by millions deserve compensation. This doesn't apply as much to Redis Labs since they swooped in much later, but the general principle of trying to monetize your project with source-available licenses doesn't feel unethical to me.

You're right that it's probably not a great business model most of the time, but what is a good business model to collect some of the value you've produced from dedicating years of your life to something loved by millions of people? It's certainly less sketchy than monetizing a free service with ads, or something.

> This doesn't apply as much to Redis Labs since they swooped in much later, but the general principle of trying to monetize your project with source-available licenses doesn't feel unethical to me.

Yes, monetizing with a proprietary license, whether source available or not, doesn't seem unethical to most people outside of Free Software ideologues.

“The licensing model isn't unethical but competing ones are” isn’t why open source licenses became popular over proprietary (including source available) licenses, the fact that they commoditized the underlying software, enabled competing orojects evolved from the same codebase on essentially equal terms (which also allowed a competing project to fully replace the original if the original at some point failed the community) and, as hosted offerings became more common, the zero licensing friction for hosted solutions, that's what did it.

It does mean charging monopoly rents for a hosted service isn't a viable way to recover development costs and pay returns to VCs, but until fairly recently, no one was trying to do VC-backed startups around single open-source products with that as their whole business plan, and the arguments as to why that would be a bad idea were well developed by the mid-1990s

> Developers who spend years creating, maintaining, and continually improving an open source database (or other project) used by millions deserve compensation.

Redis Labs can start by compensating its external contributors (Tencent, Amazon, Alibaba among them) if they care about fairness this much.

Don't forget it's dependencies like the Linux kernel developers or GCC etc.

There is no requirement to make money to have a successful open source project.

That being said. Monetizing open source is fine so long as people are up front about from the beginning. People are upset because switching the license is effectively changing the rules in the middle of the game.

It is like going out to a restaurant and in the middle of your meal they change policy from having free refills to charging per cup. Either policy is fine, but changing policies is a scumbag move. A lot of people would have never sat down to eat there if the extra drinks weren't going to be free. Especially if free drinks was the sole reason a lot of them were going there.

> People need to make money somehow. Developers who spend years creating, maintaining, and continually improving an open source database (or other project) used by millions deserve compensation.

Look at the list of contributors to Postgres that I linked to. The vast majority of them are employed to work on Postgres, some by big tech companies, others by smaller managed hosting providers and consultancies.

That is a sustainable funding model for an open source database project. What isn't sustainable is building a business around the idea that only your company will ever profit off of (and thereby fund) the FOSS project. The whole point of FOSS is that both the work and the gains are shared with the whole community.

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