That may be true but that's a very different discussion than discussion on competing over cost.
Larger companies are willing to eat a higher cost for the sake of bureaucratic and logistic simplicity.
Larger companies are willing to eat a higher cost for the sake of bureaucratic and logistic simplicity.
The point is big established vendor free-riding on the work a smaller company has done, potentially extinguishing or significantly damaging it and by extention the future of the project.
The upstream can provide:
- Hosting (as mentioned before) or assisting in managing colocated infra.
- Proprietary Licensure for more permissive uses (as mentioned before).
- Support/Security contracts for LTS/Enterprise releases.
- Bug & Feature Bounties for priority changes (or a "hire our engineer" type system).
- Contracting and consulting services for companies building on top of their product.
That's just naming a few but there are plenty of ways to build out a reliable income base for a popular open source product as long as you pick the right licensing early on.
Hosting, Deployment help, LTS release
When you are buying a "one click" aws managed service?
Are feature or bug bounties even applicable if you have to wait an unknown amount of time for it to reach you via AWS?
I'm merely suggesting THAT copyleft doesn't provide you any protection here and WHY that is potentially problematic.
You wouldn't however I was listing them for completeness-sake because they are common strategies employed by FOSS maintainer companies and there's still a market for them outside of the AWS world.
> Are feature or bug bounties even applicable if you have to wait an unknown amount of time for it to reach you via AWS?
That can actually end up being a selling point for moving off the AWS version. If you can effectively "advertise" that and a company really needs a specific feature for their product, that might give them the justification to jump ship to the non-AWS version of the product.
> I'm merely suggesting THAT copyleft doesn't provide you any protection here and WHY that is potentially problematic.
Oh for sure. However I would maybe say that it offers limited protection here (mainly offering protection in other ways) rather than none at all. And that can definitely be problematic no doubt but nowadays I think companies are a lot more hesitant on blindly lumping everything onto AWS compared to 5 or 10 years ago so I'd like to believe that AWS' authority in deciding what is and isn't a viable product is declining in the space.