Their secret sauce is "we have a Borg Cube's worth of datacenters, so we can run the same code as you at a lower price".
The AGPL does nothing to prevent that. They aren't modifying Akka, they're just running it on a superior platform.
One license that does force the giants to share (the software part of) their secret sauce exists and is called SSPL, the one the MongoDB guys came up with.
The AGPL only covers modification to the software itself. So Amazon can take free code, sell it as a slickly-packaged service, and not need to share anything.
The SSPL says that if they do so, they need to share the code they use to make it run as a service.
They still retain their massive hardware and organizational advantages, but it does mean that at least every user has access to the code to make their "Akka Service" as good as Amazon's.
> So Amazon can take free code, sell it as a slickly-packaged service, and not need to share anything.
Right, because they didn't change it. So what would there be to share anyway? 'Go to https://github.com/akka/akka'?
> but it does mean that at least every user has access to the code to make their "Akka Service" as good as Amazon's.
That code is meaningless. In this scenario we already established that Amazon is selling an unmodified copy of Akka as a Service (which, by the way, we will revisit this point later). And we already established, in your own words, that it's not about the code:
> Their secret sauce is "we have a Borg Cube's worth of datacenters, so we can run the same code as you at a lower price".
So what would the SSPL require, they publish their deployment scripts to their cloud datacentres? Like I said, that's meaningless.
> "Akka Service"
Final point. There's no such thing as an 'Akka Service'. Akka is a bunch of libraries. You link it into your JVM application. You don't run Akka separately, so by definition you can't offer it as a service (even if you're Amazon).
Hence my suggestion of AGPL, and heck let's be generous, let's add a commercial use exception for businesses with less than $20m revenue, similar to what they're doing now with the BSL. Except with my suggestion the software would stay as strong copyleft, most businesses would be happy with the commercial use exception, and a few would have to pay their fair share.
The AGPL does nothing to prevent that. They aren't modifying Akka, they're just running it on a superior platform.
One license that does force the giants to share (the software part of) their secret sauce exists and is called SSPL, the one the MongoDB guys came up with.