[zac23or]

AWS can make billions from open source. On the other hand, solo developers who try the same path are basically seen as scammers.

Ironic.

And creating a good user interface is very, very hard. Otherwise Gimp wouldn't be the monstrosity it is.

[gitaarik]

Well I think Amazon and many other huge companies are having many unethical activities, and I think we should not think that if big companies do certain things, that it should be ok for us to do it too.

HN is a community of hackers, not business people that are only commercially interested. But Hackers need money too, so we also need to be a little bit commercial. But it would be ideal if we could be commercial without having to give up the hacker ethic.

But many people don't believe it's easy to be open source and commercial at the same time. Why would people pay if they don't have to?

I'm thinking of a new form of software licencing: what if we make a license that says that a particular piece of software must become open source after for example 5 years. Then the developer can sell the software they wrote for 5 years long, and after that it will become open source.

This would give FOSS developers more motivation to create software, and the community will benefit eventually, so people won't feel too hesitative paying for the software, because it will eventually benefit everyone.

[zac23or]

> HN is a community of hackers, not business people

From what I read here daily, it is becoming an anti-hacker, anti-worker, anti-individual and pro-big business community.

One of the proofs is this theread. You can see People defending AWS... BUT my point is not AWS is wrong, but supporting AWS and criticizing individuals is what is wrong.

And no one noticed this, and has already started defending AWS.

This is something...

[glass-z13]

>And no one noticed this

people did, it's just that you get attacked or reported if you do so, not this thread specifically but in general

[johnsutor]

This license is called a Fair-Source License https://fair.io/

[p4bl0]

Nobody is saying it's a problem to sell a user-friendly wrapper GUI to people who need it. And nobody should be saying creating those is easy. However the developer has to acknowledge the underlying open source tools (FFmpeg and ImageMagick) somewhere on their app's website. Otherwise, yes, there's a clear ethical issue in implying the heavy back-end work is done by your code.

[dymk]

This hand wringing makes it sound like it doesn’t matter what the guy does, HN will find some reason to call it sour grapes.

[scarface_74]

AWS makes billions from managing servers at scale.

[dbalatero]

Come on, that's not all they do. They also resell open source as better-UXified tooling. RDS is "just" repackaged postgres/redis/etc with a more convenient dont-have-to-peek-under-the-hood as much dev experience.

[scarface_74]

That “just” is doing a lot of heavy lifting and dismissing the entire server maintenance and HA across multiple regions is kind of strange

But Aurora is not “just” a repackaged MySQL, the entire storage layer was rewritten.

[datavirtue]

With gobs of OSS