[jchw]

If open source is so unimportant to the success of these companies, then why would they do it? This is an unsupported assertion at best.

It's clear where Terraform et al. are now that they don't need to be open source (hence why they are switching off of open source licenses without fear) but what is not well-supported by any evidence is that it would've gone the same way if it had started as shared source or closed source.

[echelon]

Amazon is able to make use of open source and keep all the benefits private.

By holding smaller companies to this OSS purity yardstick, we're allowing the Amazons of the world to clone them wholesale and reap all of the benefits.

The world needs more small companies, not big ones. This is the right way for small companies to protect themselves.

[jchw]

Apart from mirroring the sentiments of the neighboring comment regarding AGPL, that is not really the point. Companies are more than welcome to choose what things they want to open source or not open source, it's just that this stupid magic trick of "Now it's open, now it's not" is fooling people who choose software based on the ideals of open source software so that 1. foolish contributors can contribute to just another closed/shared source enterprise products for free, even if the work of outside contributors are small 2. they can ratchet up the ladder, going from attracting smaller players and open source companies all the way to enterprise customers, making you wonder if it was their plan all along, to just deceive you.

I don't have the same complaints about many open source business models, because they do not involve deception. If you contribute to Gitlab CE, it is still properly open source even if it may benefit Gitlab EE customers. BSL is not an open source license though, so Terraform is no longer an open source project. Does that matter to enterprises? Nope. Does that matter to me? I think you know the answer to that.

But it's yet another harsh lesson that you should never, ever sign a CLA outside of stuff you contribute as a result of your job. If you ever sign a CLA for work you're not being paid for, you're clearly getting scammed in slow motion.

And if abusing the goodwill that comes with open source (or maybe came with, at this point, since now we all see where this is headed from here on out) is the only way for not every company to be Amazon, maybe there's some much larger problem going on there.

[davidgerard]

> Does that matter to enterprises? Nope. Does that matter to me? I think you know the answer to that.

It does matter to the sysadmins in those corporations, e.g. me. We happily pay vendors, but not to be baited and switched.

[jchw]

Exactly. Developers like us wind up being internal evangelists for less-proven but promising products, and open source ideals help a lot with selling something less proven.

[thinkmassive]

What about AGPL?

That’s pure Free Software, and it would require Amazon to publish their changes or not offer the service. In reality they would probably choose the latter.