alt Hacker News> AWS stomped on open source projects - despite the clear desire of projects like Elasticsearch, Redis, and MongoDB not to be cloned and monetized, AWS pushed ahead with OpenSearch, Valkey, and DocumentDB anyway, capturing the hosted-service money after those communities and companies had built the markets; the result was a wave of defensive licenses like SSPL, Elastic License, RSAL, and other source-available models designed less to stop ordinary users than to stop AWS from stripping open-source infrastructure for parts, owning the customer relationship.
This is completely backwards, at least with OpenSearch and Valkey. AWS didn't create the forks until after the upstream projects changed their license, so it's really weird to say that the forks "resulted" in the license changes when those forks where a response to the license changes. With Valkey in particular it was members of the former redis core development team that created Valkey.
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> it's really weird to say that the forks "resulted" in the license changes when those forks where a response to the license changes
But those license changes were a response to how AWS was monetizing their work in ways unsustainable for the upstream projects.
First amazon was abusive. They abused their monopoly position to gain market dominance over upstream and didn’t contribute back monetarily or with code.
Next, upstream responded with a license change, then amazon escalated with the fork.
Sometimes I wonder how much it would hurt Amazon to pay the creators and maintainers of OSS software they sell 1 cent per billing period of use(1 hr?). I also wonder how much money that would offer an oss team. To contribute risk free to improving the product
You’re reading “cloned and monetized” as “forked.”
But in context, it means “cloned/downloaded and offered as a hosted service.”
The fork came later, after the defensive license, which was in response to the clone+monetized hosting, eg ElasticSearch.
I lost my sympathy for many of the open source projects philosophy, the first time I sent a patch to Redis, one of the committers took as its own, never replying to my messages, and patched it in its name. They deserve Valkey.
And I still remember JBoss and ahole Marc Fleury ...
Of course AWS didn't create the forks until the projects changed their license to disallow AWS from making money from their code! That's the whole point here.
A lot of these projects work on a business model where they open-source their core product, and provide advanced services, installation, maintenance or fully-managed services around their product. AWS was bypassing them by providing fully-managed services. On this, I am on the side of the people behind the projects. Basically AWS was eating their lunch. They had no choice but to change the licenses.