alt Hacker NewsThe "Fair Source" [1] and "Fair Code" [2] licenses are sustainable and user-friendly.
Imagine if Docker the company could charge AWS and Google for their use of their technology.
Imagine if Redis, Elastic, and so many other technologies could.
Modern database companies will typically dual license their work so they don't have their lunch eaten. I've done it for some of my own work [3].
You want your customers to have freedom, but you don't want massive companies coming in and ripping you off. You'd also like to provide a "easy path" for payments that sustain the engineering, but not require your users to be bound to you.
"OSI-approved" Open Source is an industry co-opt of labor. Amazon and Google benefit immensely with an ecosystem of things they can offer, but they in turn give you zero of the AWS/GCP code base.
Hyperscalers are miles of crust around an open source interior. They charge and make millions off of the free labor of open source.
I think we need a new type of license that requires that the companies using the license must make their entire operational codebases available.
[3] https://github.com/storytold/artcraft/blob/main/LICENSE.md
Replies
> Imagine if Docker the company could charge AWS and Google for their use of their technology.
An "issue" is that Docker these days mostly builds on open standards and has well documented APIs. Open infrastructure like this has only limited vendor lock-in.
Building a docker daemon compatible service is not trivial but was already mostly done with podman. It is compatible to the extent that the official docker cli mostly works with it oob (having implemented the basic Docker HTTP API endpoints too). AWS/GCP could almost certainly afford to build a "podman" too, instead of licensing Docked.
This is not meant to defend the hyperscalers themselves but should maybe out approaches like this in perspective. Docker got among other things large because it was free, monetizing after that is hard (see also Elasticsearch/Redis and the immediate forks).
> Imagine if Docker the company could charge AWS and Google for their use of their technology.
The technology on which Docker is based, Linux containers, was developed by Google engineers for Borg, and later Docker adopted it when it pivoted away from LXC (an IBM technology).
> Imagine if Docker the company could charge AWS and Google for their use of their technology.
I can't imagine. Tell me one software project used in AWS/GCP that Amazon/Google pay for. Not donations (like for Linux), but PAID for.
Docker started as a wrapper over LXC, Amazon has enough developers to implement that in a month.
Charging companies for software is as old as computers itself. We don't have to imagine.