[2ndorderthought]

Sometimes I wonder how much it would hurt Amazon to pay the creators and maintainers of OSS software they sell 1 cent per billing period of use(1 hr?). I also wonder how much money that would offer an oss team. To contribute risk free to improving the product

[richwater]

I think you would be surprised how many commits in OSS comes from paid workers of the various cloud companies and tech companies out there.

[ninjagoo]

> I think you would be surprised how many commits in OSS comes from paid workers of the various cloud companies and tech companies out there.

And I think the value that various cloud companies and tech companies derive from open source by far exceeds their contributions to it. When you add in the economic contribution, those OSS value-adds are an order of magnitude higher.

According this Harvard paper [1], the cost to create wide used open-source software once is about $4 Billion. The replacement value to firms that use OSS, if they had to build or buy the equivalents themselves, is about $8.8 Trillion. The Software spending effect (how much firms would need to spend on software without OSS) is 3.5x.

According to this EU study [2], EU companies invested about €1B in OSS in 2018, but in return the impact on the European economy was estimated €65B–€95B.

[1] https://www.hbs.edu/faculty/Pages/item.aspx?num=65230 [2] https://opencommons.org/images/c/c1/The_impact_of_open_sourc...

[troad]

> And I think the value that various cloud companies and tech companies derive from open source by far exceeds their contributions to it.

Isn't that how literally all economic exchange works? Why do you think your boss pays your salary?

If the argument is that Amazon should invest 110% of their OSS-derived profits back into OSS, then OSS ceases to have any value to them. They would simply write their own closed-source software, which would be trivial for a company of Amazon's size, and we'd all be poorer off for not having OSS. Getting one percent of someone's profit is better than getting zero percent.

[firesteelrain]

Understand the argument. No one is forcing anyone to make OSS. They do it because they want to. It’s like they are own worst enemy

[hunterpayne]

"It’s like they are own worst enemy"

No, you are your own worst enemy. Because of your attitude, OSS is going to go away as will all those economic benefits you are enjoying. But keep up with the its OK to pee in the pool type ethics of yours. Let's see where that gets you in the long run.

[firesteelrain]

Ok -

So you are annoyed I am using something for free and per the license that the authors set themselves and wanted no compensation. Got it.

[hunterpayne]

Nope, I'm not going to use a license that allows that for my next project. And neither will anyone else. Enjoy doing without.