To my understanding, the GPL does not require acknowledging the original author's contributions any more publicly than the Apache license (used by the project). The Apache license already requires preserving the copyright notice, which AWS did. I think the issue is the author wanted a more public acknowledgement of his work, which is a very fair ask. As far as I know, no license requires this (and, I believe such a license would be GPL-incompatible).

In my view, no license can enforce being a good citizen of the open source community. In the embedded space, I've seen vendors bound by the GPL follow it in letter but not in spirit (ie, delivering unusable code with a ridiculous toolchain), or just straight up ignore it (what are we going to do, sue?). On the flipside, good citizen vendors frequently contribute upstream even when they don't have to.

My understanding is that GPL doesn't force the user to do _anything_ except license any derived work under GPL. It specifically doesn't put _any_ limits on what someone can do with that code precisely because doing so would limit your freedom (with the exception of the licensing issue which is required so as to not deprive _other_ people of the freedom to do what they want with the code.)

It specifically does not require you to pay homage to the original author. The point is to ensure that the code remains free, the original author has no say over what happens to it.

That's true, but wanting acknowledgement in some specific way is pretty frivolous compared to wanting changes made to be available under the same license so the fork doesn't maintain an incompatibility/add-on advantage that can't be fixed.

Whether the GPL is good enough for that depends on whether end users are recipients of binaries and therefore would be entitled to the source under GPL.

> On the flipside, good citizen vendors frequently contribute upstream even when they don't have to.

I once discussed that with my employer and they agreed: it's almost never a good idea to fork a product in order to fix bugs, since you will have to continouiusly maintain the fork. If you get the fix upstream, you'll get the maintenance for free. So this often is not out of generosity, but rather in their own interests.

BSD and MIT licenses can be used with the advertising clause, and you can add anything you want. Similarly, you can add clauses to the GPL if you want.

Licenses are contracts. You can add to the contract that people who fork must do star-jumps every morning, if you feel like; but you have to state it upfront.

AFAIK, the related question of whether an OSS license for a scientific software can require that people using the software cite the paper(s) describing the software, has been answered in the negative. You can ask nicely, but you cannot demand it under any of the existing OSS licenses.

AGPL would also force Amazon to open-source their changes to services that they release that use AGPL code.

I would bet AWS wouldn’t even touch it if it was under GPL, most companies have made it forbidden to use because of reasons you stated.

And would that be a bad thing? If the tool is good, FOSS users will get a competitive advantage over AWS.

I had several discussions with fellow students in Uni about GPL vs. BSD licensing and BSD licensed code is, IMO, more free and more accessible - it really depends on what you want out of your code. Is your goal to provide a useful tool as a one-off that anyone can pick up and use? Then BSD is for you - otherwise, if you have expectations around self-maintenance of the code by consumers then you want to lean more toward GPL. The thing you get out of GPL that you lack with BSD is the ability to pull back changes and bug fixes from users - usually by explicitly excluding those parties which for legal/whatever reasons aren't comfortable re-sharing bug fixes.

GPL is about freedom for the user, BSD/MIT is about freedom for the devs. Not all users are devs, but all devs are users. GPL is the better license for net freedom.

It baffles me how many people fail to understand this.

> GPL is about freedom for the user, BSD/MIT is about freedom for the devs.

Both are about freedom that is only directly meaningful for developers or people that can employ developers on their behalf; permissive license are about simply providing that freedom rather directly, with limitations that tend to be focussed mainly on avoiding unexpected costs to the original provider of the software (liability, reputational, or otherwise). Copyleft licenses compromise direct provision of freedom to acheive broader but less direct social goals which relate to that freedom.

If you both agree with the goal and agree with the pragmatic judgement involved in the design of the detailed mechanics in a particular license about how to acheived that goal, its quite possible that a copyleft license is better for your interest.

Personally, whether the goal is (and these are two very different goals I've seen cited by GPL proponents) promoting development of free software or inhibiting development of nonfree software, I'm not sure the GPL family (or any other copyleft license) does that better, in practice, than permissive licenses.

The GPL is better at inhibiting nonfree direct descendants of a particular code base, but I don't generally see that as a valuable goal.

"GPL is about freedom for the user" - define what do you mean by freedom, it's different for different people.

GPL is the better license for net freedom. - it's not, because of it's virality, it pollutes other code and then demands everything fall into it's license, which is ethically wrong.

> GPL is the better license for net freedom. - it's not, because of it's virality, it pollutes other code and then demands everything fall into it's license, which is ethically wrong.

Nobody has a gun held to their head and are forced to use GPL code in their code.

Of course it’s more free - corporations are free to take your code and do as they please, as we’ve just seen.

Don't they already use MySQL for example? I don't think it would stop them in any way, unless some lawyers had some really antiquated views, coming straight from the 90's

MySQL has dual license and one of them if friendly to companies who can pay the fees.

FYI: Linux is licensed under GPL v2. AWS uses Linux extensively.

Amazon has a legion of lawyers and probably quite a few technically apt ones that are actually comfortable diving into questions around whether a chef/ansible/whatever script to provision a linux box will go against GPL - and additionally whether pre-baked containers qualify or if a service to dynamically build pre-baked containers would qualify...

These are, honestly, expensive questions to answer as the tech gets more complicated - at what point is linux part of the binary you're distributing vs. an external dependency and, if you get the answers wrong, you'll potentially create an outage that will wreck havoc on the economy by grinding the cloud to a halt and cost Amazon tens of billions in revenue.

This is a very, very, complicated situation.

suyash is basically correct; usage of GPL (any version) licensed software is very heavily scrutinized at Amazon. Explicit exceptions need to be filed for, and are rarely granted. Unless you can make a very strong business case for the software, you're not going to get it approved.