[palata]

> Whats the point of open source if you can't fork or sell hosted clusters?

The problem here is that Amazon is in a position where they can fork and sell it for a loss in order to crush the competition.

That would be the point of antitrust, I guess? I mean if regulations were actually enforced.

[growse]

This is not a suddenly emerging "gotcha".

This risk has always existed. It existed when they chose to open source it in the first place.

Time and time again we see the lesson being learned the hard way that "if your business value is your codebase, it's hard to build a business whilst literally giving it away".

[larodi]

> "if your business value is your codebase, it's hard to build a business whilst literally giving it away".

perhaps then it comes as no surprise that some very outspoken open-source proponents do not open-source their core business components. I can understand they do it in order to exist as a company, as busineses, but I don't understand why they have to endure being shamed for staying closed-source, while all their stack is open. many such companies exist.

and let's add to this all the fact that everything released in 2025 as open-source gets slurped by LLMs for training. so, essentially, you feed bro's models breakfast with your open-source, like it or not. in the very near future we'll be able to perhaps prompt a 'retell' of Redis which is both the same software, but written so that it is not.

in essence there seems to be now little reason to open-source anything at all, and particularly if this is a core-business logic. open-source if you can outpace everybody else (with tech), or else you shouldn't care about the revenue.

[miki123211]

A sufficiently capable LLM might be good enough to do cleanroom design on its own, with little to no human assistance. That would destroy the entire idea of copyright as it exists for software.

You need one agent that can write a complete specification of any piece of software, either just by using it and inferring how it works, or by reverse engineering if not prohibited by the license. You then have a lawyer in the middle (human or LLM) review it, removing any bits that are copyrighted. You then need another agent that can re-implement that spec. You just made a perfectly legal clone.

Cleanroom design is a well-established precedent in the US, and has been used before, just with teams of humans instead of LLMs.

I think some companies will be completely unaffected by this, as either the behavior of their code can't easily be infered just from API calls, or because their value actually lies in users / data / business relationships, not the code directly. Stripe would be my go-to example, you can't just reverse-engineer all their optimizations and antifraud models just by getting a developer API key and calling their API endpoints. They also have a lot of relationships with banks and other institutions, which are arguably just as important to their business as their code. Instagram, Uber or Amazon also fall into this bucket somewhat.

[dcow]

Humans can also do that, they’re just slower and presumably more expensive.

[eek2121]

Except that LLMs themselves are close to being killed off for the lack of clean room implementations themselves, at least here in the U.S.

[palata]

One can hope, but I don't think it will happen.

[bloomburger]

??????

[palata]

I agree with the fact that LLMs are big open-source laundering machines, and that is a problem.

I mostly see it as a problem for copyleft licences. Permissive don't protect the users in the first place, so...

[pbronez]

So who’s gonna sue an AI company asserting that all code they produce is GPL due to being trained on GPL code?

[growse]

How is training a model on GPL code and then having it write code any different to having a human read GPL code and then write code?

Unless there's a specific copyright claim over a specific piece of code that was copied and published, it's hard to see how the GPL has any relevance.

[bccdee]

Because, unlike humans, LLMs reliably reproduce exact excerpts from their training data. It's very easy to get image generation models to spit out screenshots from movies.

[palata]

I see that argument over and over, and I don't understand how people can consider it makes sense.

"My clipboard learned the code, just like a human would. So it should be fine to copy-paste anything and call it my own".

"How is killing a human any different to killing a computer?"

"If humans can vote, why couldn't computers vote as well?"

Can we start at "humans are not computers", maybe?

[palata]

I feel like nobody cares. It sucks, I know. Like climate change, biodiversity loss, the energy crisis.

Feels like we're pretty much screwed. Doesn't mean it's not a problem.

[motorest]

> I agree with the fact that LLMs are big open-source laundering machines, and that is a problem.

Why do you believe this is a problem? I mean, to believe that you first need to believe that having access to the source code is somehow a problem.

> I mostly see it as a problem for copyleft licences.

Nonsense.

At most, the problem lies in people ignoring what rights a FLOSS license grants to end users, and then feigning surprise when end users use their software just as the FLOSS license intended.

Also a telltale sign is the fact that these blind criticisms single out very precise corporations. Apparently they have absolutely no issue if any other cloud provider sells managed services. They single out AWS but completely ignore the fact that the organization behind ValKey includes the likes of Google, Ericsson, and even Oracle of all things. Somehow only AWS is the problem.

[palata]

> I mean, to believe that you first need to believe that having access to the source code is somehow a problem.

How in the world did you get there from what I said? Open source code has a licence that says what the copyright owner allows or not. LLMs are laundering machine in the sense that they allow anybody to just ignore licences and copyright in all code (even proprietary code: if you manage to train on the code of Windows without getting caught, you're good).

> At most, the problem lies in people ignoring what rights a FLOSS license grants to end users

Once it's been used to train an LLM, there is no right anymore. The licence, copyright, all that is worthless.

> Also a telltale sign is the fact that these blind criticisms [...]

No clue what you are talking about here.

[motorest]

> LLMs are laundering machine in the sense that they allow anybody to just ignore licences and copyright in all code (...)

No. Having access to the code does that. You only need a single determined engineer to do that. I mean, do you believe that until the inception of LLMs the world was completely unaware of the whole concept of reverse engineering stuff?

> Once it's been used to train an LLM, there is no right anymore.

Nonsense. You do not lose your rights to your work just because someone used a glorified template engine to write something similar. In fact, your whole blend of comment conveys a complete lack of experience using LLMs in coding applications, because all major assistant coding services do enforce copyright filters even when asking questions.

[necovek]

AI companies have not shied away from slurping anything available with complete disregard for the licensing of the material.

As such, code available is as much a boon to them as open source.

[palata]

And leaked proprietary code.

[vin047]

This is exactly what the AGPL was made to combat against. But open source devs still choose more permissive licenses first - presumably to attract corporate clients to use their product (and because devs are suckers to large corporate interests)

[palata]

This. They choose a permissive licence, proudly advertise it ("use us instead of our competitor because they are copyleft and we are not"), and then come whining when other competitors benefit from the very fact that they chose a permissive licence.

[_msw_]

There are different FOSS communities that hold different values. I come from the copyleft camp because I want to advance Software Freedom objectives for end-users. Others are more interested in advancing software developer freedom, and they find the obligations that are designed to advance end-user rights are unduly burdensome to the software developer. Articles like the one on the FreeBSD website [1] explain why they take a different position

I choose to believe that both of these sub-communities of the larger FOSS community are principled in their beliefs. I don’t see whining from FreeBSD folks about competitors, or for-profit companies using all the permissions they give with their choice of license.

[1] https://docs.freebsd.org/en/articles/bsdl-gpl/

[palata]

> I don’t see whining from FreeBSD folks about competitors

Sure! Then that's all good! I have nothing against the use of permissive licences (though I am on the copyleft camp too, obviously). Or put it in the public domain.

My problem is with those who do and then whine about it.

[_msw_]

Yeah, that really grinds my gears too.

It especially bugs me when company blogs call out “abuse” when they only exist as a company because others gave them the permissions needed to build a business on software they did not author themselves!

[palata]

> This risk has always existed.

Doesn't mean it was not a problem.

[growse]

The solution to the old problem of "what if someone uses my code to compete with me" is "don't open source your code".

This isn't complicated. It's trade secrets 101.

I'm being disingenuous though. Of course the bait-and-switch merchants know this, they're just banking on getting enough product momentum off the free labour of others before they cash in. That's the plan all along.

[plufz]

I think that is a little unfair. I don't know anything about the companies behind Redis and Elastic. But another possibility is that they want to make a good open source product and create some sort of business around it and find it difficult to make a waterproof moat. I'm sure that there are many other open source companies with the same basic strategy that are just more lucky, e.g. don't get AWS as competition.

[motorest]

> The problem here is that Amazon is in a position where they can fork and sell it for a loss in order to crush the competition.

Everyone can fork any FLOSS project. That's by design. There are also no restrictions on random people selling services directly or indirectly using said FLOSS projects.

If a corporation changes their mind and decide it was a mistake for them to release software as FLOSS, they have the right to do what Redis just did. What they can't do is feign ignorance or do a bait-and-switch to try to coerce their userbase to cough up licensing fees for FLOSS projects.

[palata]

> Everyone can fork any FLOSS project

But everyone is not in a position where they can put a ton of resources into a project in order to crush the competition and maintain their monopoly.

Which is why I said that the problem is the fact that Amazon is in this position, not the licence.

[eek2121]

IMO intent is everything.

Selling at a loss isn’t bad. Selling at a loss to build marketshare or kill competition usually is.

The issue is that previous companies usually use this aspect to build marketshare, so there is no other way to compete. Other tactics include lobbying, patent bullying, etc.

Shoot, as bad as Uber is, just look at how taxis in major cities were formed.

Then look at labor laws in other countries.

Under the current legal/political structure for any modern country, there is no winning without exploitation, which is why I refuse to start my own business.

[7952]

Do AWS really sell things at a loss?

[immibis]

No - that's why their pricing is so detailed and why their services have few limits you can't request them to increase.

They can afford to maintain a better branch of Elastic Search or Redis or so on, an drive those companies out of business by the virtue of efficient free market competition. At which point they'll make sure their branch is only useful on their servers, perhaps by adding dependencies on all their internal microservices - so technically they released the code but you can only run it if you're Amazon.

[flaminHotSpeedo]

> At which point they'll make sure their branch is only useful on their server

Can you think of any examples where they've done that? They certainly could, but I can't think of any times they have actually rug-pulled like that, and the motive to do so seems tenuous too. In order for Amazon to do something like this they would need established market dominance, as well as a belief that some new player will hurt their market share enough to justify alienating the FOSS community.

[palata]

Given what Amazon routinely does, this doesn't seem crazy at all. Just look at one of their countless anti-competitive behaviours.

[palata]

Sorry, I didn't want to imply that they do. This would be illegal as per antitrust regulations.

What I wanted to say is that AWS using a permissively-licenced project is fine. The project should have thought about the licence beforehand and started with copyleft from the beginning on. Their problem now.

But a more general problem I see is that even if you use a copyleft license for your project, you have the risk to be crushed by anti-competitive behaviours coming from TooBigTech. It's not rare, they do that all the time and the US doesn't enforce anything. And when others (like the EU) try to do it, the US put pressure because they defend their US TooBigTech.

The latter is not a model or licencing issue, it's an antitrust issue. Now Amazon could compete with Redis without doing it illegaly, but they can only because they are so big. And the fact that they are so big is related to the lack of antitrust enforcement (it's documented, TooBigTech have all abused their dominance forever).

[redditor98654]

Not really. I have done multiple AWS pricing and costing exercises while launching services and there was never a direction from the VP to sell it lower than what it costs to build and operate. Cost to build and operate includes everything from salaries, infrastructure and many other line items. And usually things are projected 3-5 years into the future and P&L analysis must show that eventually the service will make a profit. It does make some assumptions about minimum customer adoption for the profit margins to materialize which eventually becomes part of the product and sales teams goals.

The costing model does allow losses to be incurred in the initial years because building the thing is more expensive at first but then it should settle down and revenue should outpace expenses.

What can happen with these open source products being launched as a service is that that initial cost can be cut down by as much as 50-75% but rarely more than that because you still need to build all the surrounding infrastructure, documentation, UI. It still gives AWS an advantage by relying on an existing body of work they can start with where many problems have been thought through and solved. Also you will likely get a good product roadmap skeleton ready to be prioritized which otherwise can be a huge time sink.

In a nutshell, no. AWS won’t sell a service at a loss (there are exceptions of course) but there is room to incur a loss at the beginning but it is priced to eventually turn a profit. Whether that happens for every service in reality is a different story.