[AndrewKemendo]

The basic argument is that Amazon is Free Riding because they get massively more out of the resource than they put in, by virtue of their scale alone.

The free-rider problem occurs when those who benefit from resources, public goods, or services do not pay for them, which results in an underprovision of those goods or services.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free-rider_problem

[erik_seaberg]

Amazon isn't free-riding any more than everyone else. If I can buy hardware and hire SREs to run mongod myself, I should be able to pay AWS to do the same things for me, and it's weird that the authors expect a cut in one case and not the other.

[prepend]

It’s impossible to free ride with a permissive license like the one used.

It’s like complaining because Seattle sets up a free subway that supports infinite riders at $0 marginal cost and Amazon has all their employees ride it instead of making google buses.

There’s also an issue that Elastic’s district was actually worse than Amazon’s new distro due to license confusion.

[eeZah7Ux]

> It’s impossible to free ride with a permissive license like the one used.

On the contrary, permissive licenses has been quietly pushed by companies, together with replacing Free Software with Open Source, in order to exploit it.