For the purposes of the point I was making and this discussion it doesn't really matter if it's market dominance or cost.
The point is big established vendor free-riding on the work a smaller company has done, potentially extinguishing or significantly damaging it and by extention the future of the project.
Of course that can be problematic still but I don't see how they can extinguish the founding company when you are working with a license like the AGPL (with proprietary dual licensing). They are still the upstream and "parasitic downstreams" have very limited opportunities to build trenches with such a strong copyleft in play.
The upstream can provide:
- Hosting (as mentioned before) or assisting in managing colocated infra.
- Proprietary Licensure for more permissive uses (as mentioned before).
- Support/Security contracts for LTS/Enterprise releases.
- Bug & Feature Bounties for priority changes (or a "hire our engineer" type system).
- Contracting and consulting services for companies building on top of their product.
That's just naming a few but there are plenty of ways to build out a reliable income base for a popular open source product as long as you pick the right licensing early on.
> Why would you need Hosting, Deployment help, LTS release When you are buying a "one click" aws managed service?
You wouldn't however I was listing them for completeness-sake because they are common strategies employed by FOSS maintainer companies and there's still a market for them outside of the AWS world.
> Are feature or bug bounties even applicable if you have to wait an unknown amount of time for it to reach you via AWS?
That can actually end up being a selling point for moving off the AWS version. If you can effectively "advertise" that and a company really needs a specific feature for their product, that might give them the justification to jump ship to the non-AWS version of the product.
> I'm merely suggesting THAT copyleft doesn't provide you any protection here and WHY that is potentially problematic.
Oh for sure. However I would maybe say that it offers limited protection here (mainly offering protection in other ways) rather than none at all. And that can definitely be problematic no doubt but nowadays I think companies are a lot more hesitant on blindly lumping everything onto AWS compared to 5 or 10 years ago so I'd like to believe that AWS' authority in deciding what is and isn't a viable product is declining in the space.
Larger companies are willing to eat a higher cost for the sake of bureaucratic and logistic simplicity.