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by ddevault 1752 days ago
You can make that case, and you're entitled to distribute your software under terms that prevent this.

But this is the deal you sign up for when you make free and open source software. If you want to make another kind of software, that's quite fine, but it's not free software nor open source.

1 comments

Especially if your complaint is "We got lots of growth because people adopted our open source software but then Amazon published a hosted version and now we can't claim as much of the commercial opportunity, so we need a more restrictive license."

Would the software have attained the userbase it did if they were the terms from the outset? A lot of these companies just assume that it would have been the exact same except for the absence of an amazon competitor if these licenses were used.