| So when cloud providers like AWS are contributing to an open source project that they also host, I wouldn't call it "charity". The self-interest is obvious. The problem is that it may not match the self-interest of other contributors. Especially when there is a "main" company that owns the IP of the open source that is not them. But note how Amazon forked ElasticSearch when it became no longer open source, to their "OpenSearch" OpenSearch is Apache-licensed. Amazon engineers maintain it. This is not charity exactly, Amazon makes money from selling hosting of it. In the "classic" age of open source, most projects were collaborations, where different people who got paid by differnet employers worked on it on company time, because their employers used it for their operatons. And were willing to pay to contribute to the software they used. Most of these were not in the business of selling software. They did not expect to make direct money from their contributions to the software. This is how apache httpd began for instance. I think some of the employers of contributors were non-profit as well. I think that's actually the only sustainable model for open source. A single company paying people to develop open source software and hoping to make money from that -- was probably never actually sustainable. If the current economic conditions don't support people working on the clock to contribute to open source software that their employers use -- because software has gotten too complex, or because companies have gotten much more stingy or unwilling to pay for such things -- then indeed we won't have much open source anymore, we'll have proprietary source-available licenses like this. |