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Comment by microgpt | Hacker News Reader

Do you believe that everyone being locked into a proprietary Amazon version of your code delivers more value than either: Amazon releases the source code to their version, or: lock-in hasn't occurred yet but people are free to add those same features in a free version?

Isn't there ultimately more value in Amazon releasing the source code for its update than in Amazon not releasing that?

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You seem to be asserting some simple zero-sum exclusionary game here that does not exist. I am entirely content if Amazon or Google extracts some value - that in no way inhibits anyone else doing so in reality. But to me the far more important case - a messy long tail - is smaller organisations such as the small telco that used a few lines of my code to help avoid early smart-ish picture phones on their network blowing each other up with malformed JPEGs. Said telco could not have released the exchange's software suite under GPL if I'd had that 8 lines of my Java under GPL rather than Apache.

Are you content with Amazon using its rights to prevent others from using theirs? They've done embrace-extend-extinguish to MIT software before, making everyone reliant on a proprietary version of the software.

Amazon easily has the market power to make their version of your software the default one. Other software will be written so it only works with the Amazon version, and that version will be proprietary and run only on their servers. I'm not really seeing how this increases freedom. They almost did this with both Redis and ElasticSearch. They did something similar to MySQL and Postgres, obsoleting them both with Amazon Aurora, but that hasn't run to its conclusion yet.

You are constructing a universe that simply does not exist or apply to me at least. I and my code are just not that important or special in the grand scheme of things.

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