That is special. That is wonderful. It is a place for idealism. And honestly, it's worth getting angry about when people (and companies) don't respect it and improve upon it.
But OSS is a fragile and wonderful thing, and an entity with the resources and clout of AWS would (at least in my opinion) do well to tend that garden rather than strip it bare.
Use an open source license that contains ALL of the terms you want involved. You don't get to back out of the open source deal or heap guilt on others because you have regrets about other people literally complying with your terms.
That’s the whole point of the license. You’re putting code out there for others to use however they want.
This isn’t even about legal requirement vs intent. If you put up a super permissive license, you are making the intent very clear that people can do whatever they want with it.
The lack of obligation, both legal and societal, of using open source software is what makes it so useful and lets the whole ecosystem flourish.
If your in open source for glory and getting monetary or promotional credit for your work, you’re doing it for the wrong reason.
Same thing with a company like Amazon. They are enormously wealthy. So we look poorly on them when they don't give back to those bringing them even more wealth. Because they easily could. Because it wouldn't hurt them at all. Because it is right.
To say “if you want to restrict use, then license appropriately” is to push heavily towards everyone using more restrictive licenses.
If other people contribute back, great. If I get credit, great. But those are not the motivations when you put up something like a BSD license. Licenses mean things so you need to choose a restrictive license if you get your feelings hurt when people use your software in a way you don’t like.
Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft, and many, many other companies are literally building tools for their competitors.
That's so outside the realm of possibility in any other industry that a copyright lawyer (or executive) in any heavily-patented field would laugh you out of their office for suggesting something like that.
AWS has appeared to be doing a better job recently (from what I can see) in that regard. It's all around good PR. They lose nothing by thanking the maintainer/community for the work, even though the license doesn't require this. On the other-hand they build good-will.
Given the AWS response linked above, it would appear AWS recognizes this, and so maybe they will better accredit the work.
The money changers have fled from their high seats in the temple of our civilization. We may now restore that temple to the ancient truths. The measure of the restoration lies in the extent to which we apply social values more noble than mere monetary profit.
Happiness lies not in the mere possession of money; it lies in the joy of achievement, in the thrill of creative effort. The joy and moral stimulation of work no longer must be forgotten in the mad chase of evanescent profits." [1]
> "Okay, first of all, let me answer. What they did is illegal, number one. Also, the numbers are all wrong, with the numbers they released. And just so you understand, when you have a lot of real estate, I have real estate, you know a lot of it. Okay? Right down the road, Doral, big stuff, great stuff. When I decided to run, I’m very underlevered, fortunately, but I’m very underlevered. I have a very, very small percentage of debt compared. In fact, some of it, I did as favors to institutions that wanted to loan me money. $400 million compared to the assets that I have, all of these great properties all over the world, and frankly, The Bank of America building in San Francisco. I don’t love what’s happening to San Francisco. 1290 Avenue of the Americas, one of the biggest office buildings."
[1] https://www.rev.com/transcript-editor/shared/HJCYu2w66p28wT2...
Back in the day I thought Obama was amazing. He was articulate and considered in his manner of speech. Then we hearing about the drone strikes with heavy collateral damage. And then Snowden came out and told us how Obama administration had put in place all the necessary infrastructure for a surveillance state. And then he put in place Title XI and kangaroo courts at Universities to completely undermine the core tenet of our legal system "Innocent until proven guilty".
Articulate does not equal morality or justice or fairness. It certainly did not with Obama.
I do not think that is accurate. The Obama administration sustained the growth from the previous administration. I do wish they had curtailed this growth, but c'est la vie.
Just give it different names each time congress finds out- Total Information Awareness, Carnivore (slightly different system, head of same hydra), etc.
We have not seen such an egregious abuse of open source software with any other company. Most companies that make use of a large amount of opensource actually contribute a fair amount back.
Like hiring on the core developers or making a large amount of code fixes and feature development contributions.
Amazon does neither of these things.
Take a look at any highly successful society or community. There is a large amount of gifting and selfless behavior
I don't think your claim about Amazon is true. But even if it is, it's not relevant. None of the OSI licenses require improvements to be contributed back to the original project. The most restrictive of them simply requires improvements to be open to the user.
The intention of open source licenses was never to force those who redistribute the software to improve on it. It was to provide end users with the freedom to be able to do that themselves, by distributing the improvements as well.
It's unfortunate that licenses from a generation ago don't adequately cover all the nuance of cloud computing. But the reality is that open source licenses were never about preventing companies from profiting at the expense of original developers. They were about user freedom. If you're unhappy with the way a company is using the software you open sourced, that is a sign you weren't prepared to commit to what open source means, philosophically.
Something like the AGPL would be preferable, if also more controversial. Then you'd also have a peanut gallery of people telling you your software is "source available" instead of open source.
Perhaps that was the intentions of the license creators, but famously Linus for example chose the GPL license precisely as a quid pro quo - I give you code for free, you give me back code for free.
When companies couldn't find free software to use, they just wrote it themselves, typically, unless it was something big and way outside their domain.
Rather than being beholden to a licensing agreement, it would be nice if OSS had a license for an "enterprise-level donation" that was mandatory for for-profit use. It would be a one-time cost, so it would be easier to push through the accountants at lots of big companies, and companies could feel free to use the software at their leisure. Authors/contributors could choose to charge another fee for upgrading to a new major version, opt to end support of an old version or not and so on and so forth.
I think the software community is having an "I never thought the leopards would eat my face" moment.
The community pushed for a long time for licenses that donated labor to corporations because the licenses sounded more "free", and that flattered their politics.
When the corporations actually pick up the value everyone left on the table, the community gets outraged.