[dudus]

Because historically they made money selling managed version of their services.

Now GCP, AWS and Azure just sell a superior managed version for cheaper. So they lost their income stream.

Open source products tried to change the license so the big guys would at least have to pay them something to make money on their work.

[dakiol]

Isn’t that problem easily solved by adding to your open source project’s license: “FAANG companies (like Google, etc.) cannot use or make profit from this project” ?

Better stated, of course, but you get the point.

[dudus]

That's exactly what Terraform and Redis did.

The open source license is designed to guarantee your liberties. The moment you start to remove some liberties you have neutered it.

[lijok]

There isn't a well known / widely accepted license with such clauses (afaik, happy to be corrected). Noone other than individual tinkerers will ever touch anything with a custom license or any license ambiguity for that matter.

Meta's LlaMa for example is "OSS" but under a custom license which effectively prohibits hyperscalers from using it

[mrbishalsaha]

They can just open subsidiaries and use that to go around them. Also the big guys do donate a lot of money.

The real reason might be VCs. The companies going closed source have raised from VCs and they are pushed to more and more growth just changing licenses and taking control.

[paulv]

That change makes it no longer free/open source.

[johnny22]

such software cannot be included in many popular linux distributions which means less people are going to have easy access to it.

[sethops1]

I mean that's basically what they're doing. The BUSL license these projects are using boil down to "you can't resell the project against us". But that's a non-starter for many folks and the companies using such a license are the devil.

[tensor]

Yes, there is far too much ambiguity in these licenses. Especially because you never know what will happen in the future. You could be found to be in competition after they launch a new product or new feature, years after not being in competition. At that point changing out their product could be too challenging, forcing you into arbitrarily expensive commercial license agreements.

Certainly one of the reasons why open source is popular in software is that it gives you options for maintenance prices. You can do it yourself or pay any number of consulting agencies to do it for you, or the creators of the software. When it becomes locked to one vendor suddenly the market economics change hugely. Now that vendor can crank the price up extremely high, basically until just before the point your willing to engage in a hugely expensive software refactor to move to a different product.

Open standards were supposed to help make it easier to move to new products, but in reality, it rarely is that clean. E.g. look at SQL, while it's easier maybe to move from one SQL database to another than from one completely custom database to another, it's still a massive amount of work due to details of each SQL server.