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by pookeh 551 days ago
Can we please just move to using OSS licenses with a clause namely targeting cloud providers? e.g this MIT license is applicable to everyone except for the following companies: Amazon, Microsoft, Google.

Leave the rest of us poor folk alone so we don’t have to seek expensive legal counsel.
3 comments
forty 551 days ago
I think the right solution for this problem, and many others, is not to allow the "platform" to compete inside their own garden.

So if you offer infrastructure, you cannot offer managed DBs there, if you have a market place you cannot sell on it, if you have an app store, you cannot sell apps there. Etc etc

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pabs3 544 days ago
That would not be an OSS license under the OSD.

https://opensource.org/osd

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akoboldfrying 551 days ago
What if they had named Facebook in that list, and then Facebook became Meta?

I don't know anything about the legal side of things, but although I can see the appeal of a short blacklist, I think it would be a can of worms.

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Nemo_bis 550 days ago
Most of the Facebook companies are still called Facebook, see for example FACEBOOK IRELAND HOLDINGS UNLIMITED COMPANY https://opencorporates.com/companies/ie/466405 and some of its connected companies.

Still, you'd probably need a license steward to keep the list of companies up to date, and you'd keep the list in an annex. Alternatively you'd need to pick some objective thresholds, such as "more than 1 T$ market cap or more than 100 G$ global annual revenues". This is the approach the EU followed with the Digital Markets Act.

(I'm not saying that I'm endorsing such an approach.)

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