[judahmeek]

> Then once things are fairly stable and well-understood, another person can just yoink it.

That transparency & availability for community contributions or forks is the point of open-source.

If you're only using open-source as marketing because you're bad at marketing, then you should probably go closed source & find a non-technical business partner.

Whoever "yoinks" the package runs into the same problem because they now have to build credibility somehow to actually profit from it.

[atrocious]

Established corporations will be doing yoinking, with a pre-existing credibility. There's a huge incentive to offer these copied services for cents on the dollar, as a way to kill the competition.

[judahmeek]

Credibility doesn't transfer easily.

Anyone who yoinks an open-source package still has to present an argument about why their offering is better than the original maintainer's.

[atrocious]

I agree, but it's historically been as simple as "you already use AWS for everything else". For example, ElasticSearch.

[anematode]

When push comes to shove, cheapness and hype can shove.

[remus]

It'll be interesting to see if this happens at a service level too. Like how lots of companies offer an S3 compatible API, will companies start offering similar services and building a compatibility layer over the top as an easy way to for customers to transition? You could use the existing service as a test suite to check your compatibility API behaves the same as the original product.