alt Hacker NewsThe author calls it a 'joke' that Heroes are just unpaid Amazon employees, but reality doesn't become a joke just because it's funny. The asymmetry here is staggering. I find myself holding back private research because I don't want to provide free R&D for a value-extraction machine that is already efficient enough.
The author was at least dependency-driven in their contribution, but outside that kind of dependency, it's hard to justify contributing even 'in the open' when the relationship is this one-sided. Amazon in particular has done enormous damage to the economic assumptions that permissive open source once relied on. There's increasingly more projects adopting 'Business Source Licenses', precisely to prevent open work from becoming a free input into hyperscaler monetization.
These devs know Amazon is grabby and, at some point, the only dominant outcome their community contribution is upstream of is unpaid labor for a trillion-dollar entity that also diverts support and community engagement away from the original projects by funneling users into managed versions of the same software.
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> There's increasingly more projects adopting 'Business Source Licenses', precisely to prevent open work from becoming a free input into hyperscaler monetization.
They could use AGPL or GPL3, typically those licenses are verboten in hyperscalers.
The truth is that the sort of company opting for BSL never really wanted to do OSS, and in truth only did so for the optics of it, for the goodwill it buys among developers, etc.
I'm "lucky" to not be smart enough or important enough to think about this. Regardless, i wholeheartedly agree -- at this point, anything i personally could release publicly, will either be fully open source, or completely private. And I'm only choosing open source if I'm relatively sure it's not gonna make some asshole tons of money.
If someone doesn't like Amazon using software they write, they can just outright disallow Amazon from using it in the copywrite license.
It's perfectly legal to say: "except for Amazon [and whoever], anyone can use this for any purpose, provided..."
Amazon won't intentionally use that software. It's not worth the potential legal liability.
That doesn't mean Amazon won't write their own version though if they think they need to at some point.