F/OSS exists so that not everyone has to be subject to undifferentiated work, among serving other very high impact purposes. Think brew.sh, vim/Emacs, Eclipse IDE, Postgres, Java, Linux/Linaro etc;
Substitute AWS for "a software developer" and see if you feel the same way.
> I feel so much for the hundreds of open source developers who toil everyday only to have other software developers make so much money out of it... while contributing nothing back to any of the open source projects. This has to be fixed...
As someone who writes open-source, I'm always happy to see other developers use my code to build cool stuff, and I expect nothing in return.
I'm also happy to see small start-ups rise faster by using my software.
But if those theoretical start-ups, whose business wouldn't exist without my software, grew to dozens of employees, made millions of dollars, and still I wouldn't see a nickel.. That's when I would start to wonder, why am I doing this for free?
Incidentally, the bigger the company, the less likely it is to contribute back.
To conclude, that sounds like false equivalency to me. It does matter who is using it for free and profiting.
AWS does / did contribute patches to Elasticsearch.
The problem Elasticsearch has is, AWS shares none of the gigantic profits it makes from its Elasticsearch Service, which is a double whammy because it cannibalizes Elastic's own SaaS offering.
> To conclude, that sounds like false equivalency to me. It does matter who is using it for free and profiting.
You mean to say, Facebook must share a % of its WhatsApp profits with ejabberd, or ejabberd otherwise is right to SSPL their software?
Or, Google pay Oracle a share of the spoils because it is an "app container layer" on top of Java/JVM? And that Oracle is okay to switch to SSPL otherwise in search of those dollars?
Or, okay if CnFdn SSPLs k8s?
Also, if it matters whoever profits contributes back monetarily, may be the right way to do so would be via a Foundation. Using the Commons Clause or SSPL is not the answer, in my eyes.
Substitute AWS for "a software developer" and see if you feel the same way.
> I feel so much for the hundreds of open source developers who toil everyday only to have other software developers make so much money out of it... while contributing nothing back to any of the open source projects. This has to be fixed...