> If everyone stomps their feet and says "there's no solution, otherwise it's not OSS!" then the end result is only going to be a lot less open-source software
There's going to be less people trading on the idea of open source software while relying on the exclusivity of control of proprietary software—which in fact does not solve the problems which lead users to prefer open source software—to enable monetization, so we’ll be back to the status quo before the last handful of years where open source software was peripheral projects and supporting infrastructure funded by its users either as internal projects or via external foundations, rather than the central products of startups that have no business plan consistent with the product remaining open. But that’s okay.
I mean it seems to me like of these two situations:
1) there's a lot of software that's mostly-open-source-except-Amazon-isnt-allowed-to-run-a-hosted-version-of-it-without-paying-the-authors
2) all the software from 1) is completely proprietary
a lot more people benefit from 1 than 2. But somehow it seems that OSS purists prefer #2? It seems like they would rather less Open-Source Software in the world, all to maintain the purity of the meaning?
> there's a lot of software that's mostly-open-source-except-Amazon-isnt-allowed-to-run-a-hosted-version-of-it-without-paying-the-authors
That's...not mostly open source. Being able to pay whomever to run a hosted version for you and not have that be exclusive to the original creators isn't, especially in the age when hosted services are in high demand, a peripheral feature of open source. It's integral to the value proposition.
I said nothing about having hosting "be exclusive to the original creators"
If AWS/Google/Azure had to pay some fee to the original creators to provide a hosted version, they would definitely do it for a popular enough product.
Everyone would still get all the benefits, except AWS/Google/Azure get a little less money (down from some hundreds of millions) and the creators get a little more than $0.
I fail to see the negative effects on any entity there except what would amount to rounding error in AWS costs. Doesn't actually seem so integral to the value proposition of open source. Definitely seems "mostly open source".
Yes, because OSS software enjoys a massive popularity boost -- there are a lot of people who will always chose an open source product if one is available. So in the option (2) some software will turn proprietary, but I bet that overall number of OSS users will not change that much... it will be just re-distributed.
For example, if ElasticSearch would have been closed source? People would go to Solr. If Solr closes? Postgres and a lot of swearing.
You have to remember that while AWS ElasticSearch was a bad thing for Elastic Co, it was absolutely great for all sorts of much smaller companies who did not have enough resources to run their own clusters, as Elastic's offering is 2x price of AWS one [0].
I don't think it's a matter of maintaining the purity of the meaning, it's about maintaining the intent. The point of FOSS isn't to let people benefit up to the point where they start being able to outcompete you, the point is to let people benefit freely. If you want to achieve the former, you can just release it for free for non-commercial purposes.
There's going to be less people trading on the idea of open source software while relying on the exclusivity of control of proprietary software—which in fact does not solve the problems which lead users to prefer open source software—to enable monetization, so we’ll be back to the status quo before the last handful of years where open source software was peripheral projects and supporting infrastructure funded by its users either as internal projects or via external foundations, rather than the central products of startups that have no business plan consistent with the product remaining open. But that’s okay.