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by capableweb 1379 days ago
> I bet they are doing this to prevent Amazon from deploying a version of Akka as a service on AWS.

Yes, it's pretty clear they no longer want to participate in the Open Source ecosystem, as allowing people to run the software however you see fit is a integral part of Open Source, together with being able to modify and reshare said software.
2 comments
Dylan16807 1379 days ago
They're releasing everything as Apache on a delay. That's definitely participating.

> allowing people to run the software however you see fit is a integral part of Open Source

Does that depend on whether you consider corporations to be people?

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echelon 1379 days ago
> Open Source ecosystem

Free money and labor for Amazon ecosystem.

Honestly I'd love to see a license that was "Apache for everyone but Amazon (or other $100B+ companies and their subsidiaries)"

Open source is being weaponized in ways that Stallman never predicted.

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capableweb 1379 days ago
> Free money and labor for Amazon ecosystem.

"Free software for everyone" is precisely what Open Source is

> Honestly I'd love to see a license that was "Apache for everyone but Amazon (or other $100B+ companies and their subsidiaries)"

Yeah, that's basically what the BSL license Akka is moving to is. Only projects earning over X amount per year need the business license, for others it's free.

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ocdtrekkie 1379 days ago
That's more or less what SSPL is. The problem is the OSI and FSF are basically religious pharisees, so dedicated to their texts, they're missing the actual point. People backing the OSI/Amazon over Elastic/Mongo/etc. are literally killing open source.
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dwaite 1379 days ago
> People backing the OSI/Amazon over Elastic/Mongo/etc. are literally killing open source.

AGPL, the license Mongo was originally under, isn't used in reality to prevent deployed applications from hoarding changes; rather, it used to scare commercial entities away from deploying your code. With a commercial CLA providing exclusive code ownership, it allows you a legal club to block others, even other contributors, from competing against your current business interests.

It is licenses like the AGPL and commercial CLAs which have been killing open source and free software, because they destroy motivation for any significant third party contributions and the resulting emergent ecosystem around a project. It reduces the idea of open source and of free software down a lot closer (in my opinion) to source code escrow.

MongoDB didn't want any Amazon changes to be contributed to the project. They wanted to block another commercial entity from offering a service based on their IP. From an open source perspective, I don't take their side any more than I would take Amazon's.

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zozbot234 1378 days ago
AGPL is an actual FLOSS license though, SSPL is not. And Amazon (or any other entity) would be quite within their rights to publically deploy AGPL software as long as they merely published the changes in the deployed version. There's no requirement for such changes to be accepted by upstream.
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