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by palata 406 days ago
> You can't have it both ways.

I believe that antitrust laws should prevent TooBigTech from being in that position in the first place.

The problem is not the open source licence, but rather the fact that TooBigTech can screw the competition whenever they feel like it.
1 comments
motorest 406 days ago
> I believe that antitrust laws should prevent TooBigTech from being in that position in the first place.

Irrelevant. If you grant a right to everyone under the sun, you do not get to retroactively pull those rights from someone you decided to target.

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palata 406 days ago
Of course it is relevant. TooBigTech is killing smaller companies just because it is too big.

When there are issues like this ("we made a successful product and someone forked it and it's killing us"), the "someone" is generally a BigTech, not 3 students in a garage. Then people complain about open source working/not working, and forget that the root problem is the monopoly that is screwing them.

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motorest 406 days ago
> Of course it is relevant.

No, it is irrelevant. Try to think about it for a second. You release a project under a license that grants everyone the right to use it as they see fit, including building a business on it. Everyone starts using the project as they see fit.

Do you believe you now have the right to retroactively pull the license on a whim?

No, you do not.

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palata 406 days ago
> No, it is irrelevant.

Yes, it is relevant.

Try to think about it for a second: multiple problems can exist in parallel:

1. Some company uses a permissive licence, sees a competitor making a proprietary product from their base, and starts whining. Too bad, they should have used a copyleft licence from the beginning on.

2. Some company makes a nice product. TooBigTech sees it and builds an alternative (be it a fork or from scratch, I don't care). TooBigTech offers it for free (because they can, because they are too big) and capture the market. The original smaller company dies, because they can't offer their product for free. Now TooBigTech can start enshittifying because they own the market, again.

> Do you believe you now have the right to retroactively pull the license on a whim?

If you own the copyright to the whole codebase, of course you can. All those contributors who signed a CLA and are now whining should think about that.

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specialist 405 days ago
> irrelevant

I don't think that word means what you think it means.

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growse 406 days ago
Large companies using their scales to compete is a feature of capitalism, not a bug.

AWS only gets to compete using their source code because they opened it in the first place. The competition was explicitly invited.

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motorest 406 days ago
> Large companies using their scales to compete is a feature of capitalism, not a bug.

It's more fundamental that that. It's this idea that a corporation can arbitrarily change licensing terms already granted to end-users to extort them.

This is not limited to any managed service provided by a random cloud provider. The core reasoning is a corporation identifying end-users who are profiting from a service that directly or indirectly involves a project they release to the public under a FLOSS license. They see people getting paid, and retroactively change terms to coerce them into paying them. The same argument they throw at AWS providing a managed service also applies to any company using their project. How does this make any sense?

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palata 406 days ago
> It's this idea that a corporation can arbitrarily change licensing terms already granted to end-users to extort them.

If contributors refused to sign CLAs, then corporations would either not get contributions or not be able to arbitrarily change the licence. It's also the contributor's fault if they contribute to a permissive project and give up their copyright. Is it extortion if they agreed to it?

And then those contributors come whining because the corporation does whatever they want. Too bad, don't sign a CLA. And don't contribute to permissively-licenced projects if you don't want your code to end in proprietary products.

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palata 406 days ago
> Large companies using their scales to compete is a feature of capitalism, not a bug.

Large companies using their dominant position to compete is not a feature of capitalism. Antitrust laws prevent that. It's just that the US ignores them.

> AWS only gets to compete using their source code because they opened it in the first place. The competition was explicitly invited.

This part I agree with: if you build a permissively-licenced project, you don't get to whine when competitors use it in their own proprietary alternatives.

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