Exactly this.

Open Source software quickly becomes a tragedy of the commons because most organizations are unscrupulous. Look at how AWS destroyed the entire Elastic, MongoDB, PostgreSQL, Kafka, etc ecosystems by abusing overly permissive licenses.

Since when is abiding by the license abuse?

Oh you mean the unwritten, unenforceable, undefined, romanticized spirit of the license?

You ain't wrong!

It's a major reason why I'd never release a core revenue generating feature of mine under a permissive Open Source License.

Unsrupulous implies some form of an ethical code, whereby you are judged by intent, not by action - which is an idealized view of the world but an unrealistic one at that.

They're not unscrupulous. They're using the software as it is licenced, which is the software's declaration of how it is allowed to be used.

The problem lies with OSS, not with people using it.

The problem lies with people expecting to apply non-FOSS monetization strategies to FOSS.

Particularly with corporate charity (aka "permissive") licenses. If you want the source to stay open for users further down the chain, use a license that requires that.

One should wonder why companies love "open source" software so much and despise "free software" even more.

On the matter, Grafana has relicensed most of its software to AGPLv3 (eg: https://github.com/grafana/grafana/blob/main/LICENSE)

Strongly disagree with your point as you are comparing SaaS vendors who package these technologies under the hood with no immediate access provided to their customers, just as means to delivering a service with tech providers who were just blatantly packed by AWS and provided as identical technology.

There is a huuuuge difference between OP and your examples.

the tragedy of the commons is a thoroughly debunked though experiment, and actual studies show that in the real world, just like in this case, the real tragedy of the commons is when one entity (hashicorp) is able to monopolize a common good (open source software with contributions from tons of people outside of hashicorp) in a way everyone who was being a good user of the commons (by contributing back to those projects) is opposed to because it actively destroys something everyone was using collaboratively.

I have been thinking a lot about the tragedy of the commons (totc) within the context of usufructian socialist services and expanding them beyond their fairly narrow use case currently (public libraries are the biggest example). I was theorycrafting community makerspaces, tool libraries, and public baths, but I was hung up on thinking about totc. Do you have some sources that you would recommend for more detail on refuting or debunking totc? Thanks!

How has Amazon destroyed these ecosystems? As far as I know, all of these products are very much alive and well.

> Look at how AWS destroyed the entire ... PostgreSQL, Kafka, etc ecosystems

Err, I think you need better examples, as the PostgreSQL ecosystem is doing just fine, and RDS doesn't threaten anyone's IPO price. Since Kafka is not only Apache licensed but is an Apache project, I gravely doubt that the Apache Foundation is going to IPO anytime soon either

If you want to pick on two other ecosystem casualties by the Big Bad AWS Gonna Steal Our Shit fearmongering, use Sentry and Sourcegraph as examples of "we want the community until we don't" rug pulls

Do you think Google should lock down the go language and compiler, considering how much value they've given Terraform and likely how little Terraform has paid for go itself?

Alphabet doesn't generate revenue from Go.

Following your example, Alphabet should open source all the weights they use in their current search algorithm as well as the algorithm itself.

And extending that principle, they should also open source the machine translation model and weights Robert DeNero made for them when at Google Translate.

Both of these are dumb hypotheticals but serve to point out the fact that there are loss leaders and revenue generators at each company.

No. My point was, companies should make money from services, not software. I believe all software should have a FOSS license.

I get your point but wouldn't that encourage businesses to make their software to be as badly designed as possible to sell as much service/support as possible on e they get ahold of the market?

> Alphabet doesn't generate revenue from Go.

Hashicorp doesn't generate revenue from Terraform.

(They do generate revenue from Terraform Cloud, but that's a backend for Terraform, not Terraform itself)

True, just like Qualcomm bought Eudora (mac) email for fame, Google started the Go project to keep Rob Pike (of UNIX fame) happy and to help their own internal SRE teams. The public "good will" and benefits to Google SRE have more than paid for their efforts to create the Go language, plus also there is some publicity and fame for Google having most of the remaining early UNIX guys on staff ...

My employer pays for Visual Studio, JetBrains, Mac tax + dev license pays for XCode, Oracle, SQL Server,...

I guess it is up to Google to decide how to monetize Go, or who knows, maybe some day they will put it into a foundation of sorts that should find a way to keep sponsoring its development.

Terraform would have avoided years of stringly typed mess had it not been written in Go. I’d estimate that half the provider bugs I saw were either because of a lack of generics (and correct unwillingness to generate code), or because of casting empty interfaces.

The only advantage was static binaries, which not many other languages in a usable state supported at the time. It’s not even like there was an ecosystem at the time - HC had to maintain an AWS client for Go for several years, and similarly for Azure.