As I explained in an earlier thread, MongoDB tried using AGPL. AGPL is not a barrier for Amazon, they still will resell your product without contributing. MongoDB ended up using a variant of AGPL that is even stricter (requiring the entire tech stack to be under the same license) but is no longer considered FOSS. Until the attitude changes around what FOSS is, this will keep happening.
Um. Mongodb changed its license before AWS offered a mongodb compatible service. And since I can't get the source code for documentdb, either it isn't actually using a fork of mongodb, or Amazon isn't complying with the AGPL. I think the latter is pretty unlikely.
AWS never offered MongoDB as a managed service, or used any of their server software when it was licensed under APLv3, or SSPLv1.
However, we have contributed patches to MongoDB even after their license change to improve its performance on Graviton processors. Because that's what's good for customers, and MongoDB is an important customer and partner.
AGPLv3 gives all the permissions needed to offer software as a manged service, just like every other FOSS license does. Unfortunately, in my personal opinion, the license has been co-opted by companies that do not care about Software Freedom, and rather hope that companies fear the license so they choose an alternative commercial agreement [1]. I don't think that's good for the community.
> Does Amazon have any policies against offering AGPv3 software as a service?
Each use of AGPLv3 licensed software has to be reviewed to ensure that the obligations of the license can be and will be met (and also screen for cases where it is known that the vendor of software does not prefer a company like Amazon import the software under a FOSS license). Today we use AGPLv3 licensed software internally, and include AGPLv3 licensed software in Amazon Linux (Ghostscript, in particular).
> Does Amazon contribute funding back to the software projects they offer as a service?
Yes, in varying ways. For example, it is not easy to provide "funding" for something like Apache Kafka. You need to have people working on the upstream.
> Does Amazon contribute code changes back to the software projects they modified when offering them as a service?
Yes, but not all changes are appropriate for upstream.
> But the (modified) source is available to consumers of the service either way, under the AGPL?
If Amazon made an AGPLv3 licensed program available to others over a network, it would have an obligation to provide to anyone that has access to that program the complete corresponding source.
Today, there aren't any services from Amazon that offer AGPLv3 licensed programs as a service. An example that may come to someone's mind is Grafana, but there is a partnership there, and AGPLv3 is not the binding license in that case.
In my personal opinion, AGPLv3 compliance is not difficult, so long as the licensor of the software is committed to community-oriented copyleft enforcement principles [1].
I think it would be awesome if Amazon could offer hosted AGPLv3 software, plus revenue share with the developers, code contributions to the original project and public forks containing non-upstreamable changes.
If AWS decides to copy your product, going closed-source or source-available just means they have to copy it from design docs or protocol specs. That's more friction than being able to reuse code outright, but it's not going to stop them.
If Amazon don't have a need to change anything in software, they'll just provide it as service without any problems. AGPL permits this.
If they have to change something, then they would likely want want to return hose changes in upstream to lower maintenance burden. Or just publish changes on github of upstream doesn't want to accept them. AGPL is fine with this too.
If Amazon would like create similar offering but with some secret sauce that they don't want to share, then they'll develop in-house solution from scratch and sell it as a service in AWS.
I heard there was a lawsuit about this, but can't find the outcome. Can someone please enlighten me how that story ended (if it had - but I think it should, it's been quite a while ago)?
As I explained in an earlier thread, MongoDB tried using AGPL. AGPL is not a barrier for Amazon, they still will resell your product without contributing. MongoDB ended up using a variant of AGPL that is even stricter (requiring the entire tech stack to be under the same license) but is no longer considered FOSS. Until the attitude changes around what FOSS is, this will keep happening.