TBH my view is that the frustration towards open source companies around changing their licenses is sort of misguided. If there's a bad guy in the room, it's AWS. AWS is very good at commercializing open source -- they make literally billions of dollars doing so: Elasticache (Redis), AWS Managed Elastic, RDS etc. Changing the license becomes one of the only ways to hold them off, and the companies that have done so more proactively have fared much better. I think everyone agrees that in an ideal world this wouldn't have to happen, and indeed it didn't really happen until recently when the AWS thing started to become an issue.
Ultimately, SOMEONE is going to leverage the open source for financial gain. So, the question becomes which would you rather have:
- The company commercializing the open source (which is in almost every successful case includes the original creator(s) as a founder, CEO, or employee) benefit from the projects success, which in turn allows them to make further investment in the project.
- AWS benefit from the projects success and (generally speaking) contribute very little back.
Of course, there are plenty of projects that are NOT venture funded that see great success through purely community development. That's great! I just think commercial open source is beneficial as well, especially for larger more complex projects (databases, etc.) that need the funding. The two are not mutually exclusive.
I am also of the belief that the additional funding (both from revenue and from venture investment) that goes into these projects gives them the ability to hire more people, which in turn makes the software better for everyone.
Disclaimer: I am investor that invests predominantly in commercial open source companies. Previously I was developer who used a lot of open source, which is what led me here.
TBH my view is that the frustration towards open source companies around changing their licenses is sort of misguided. If there's a bad guy in the room, it's AWS. AWS is very good at commercializing open source -- they make literally billions of dollars doing so: Elasticache (Redis), AWS Managed Elastic, RDS etc. Changing the license becomes one of the only ways to hold them off, and the companies that have done so more proactively have fared much better. I think everyone agrees that in an ideal world this wouldn't have to happen, and indeed it didn't really happen until recently when the AWS thing started to become an issue.
Ultimately, SOMEONE is going to leverage the open source for financial gain. So, the question becomes which would you rather have:
- The company commercializing the open source (which is in almost every successful case includes the original creator(s) as a founder, CEO, or employee) benefit from the projects success, which in turn allows them to make further investment in the project.
- AWS benefit from the projects success and (generally speaking) contribute very little back.
Of course, there are plenty of projects that are NOT venture funded that see great success through purely community development. That's great! I just think commercial open source is beneficial as well, especially for larger more complex projects (databases, etc.) that need the funding. The two are not mutually exclusive.
I am also of the belief that the additional funding (both from revenue and from venture investment) that goes into these projects gives them the ability to hire more people, which in turn makes the software better for everyone.
Disclaimer: I am investor that invests predominantly in commercial open source companies. Previously I was developer who used a lot of open source, which is what led me here.