It's a sticky situation, because while these restricted licenses are clearly worse for user freedom, they are also "better than nothing" if you assume there are too few volunteer contributors and funding sources for the paid employees to continue development.
I would love to know whether these quazi-open licenses will be considered successful for the companies that switch to them. There's a short term cost here, in creating market confusion and fragmentation and general uncertainty - the potential benefits can only be realized down the road, a few years once the dust has settled and the offering has enough compelling improvements to what AWS gives. Are those benefits real?
My intuition is that, if you consider yourself in the business of competing against an Amazon hosted version of your own software, you've already lost. Amazon will destroy you in the end, regardless of whether they can directly use your code or whether they need to implement their own alternative (either from scratch or based on a different solution on a different OSS product).
To me, this sort of license change kind of reads as desperation.
I would love to know whether these quazi-open licenses will be considered successful for the companies that switch to them. There's a short term cost here, in creating market confusion and fragmentation and general uncertainty - the potential benefits can only be realized down the road, a few years once the dust has settled and the offering has enough compelling improvements to what AWS gives. Are those benefits real?
My intuition is that, if you consider yourself in the business of competing against an Amazon hosted version of your own software, you've already lost. Amazon will destroy you in the end, regardless of whether they can directly use your code or whether they need to implement their own alternative (either from scratch or based on a different solution on a different OSS product).
To me, this sort of license change kind of reads as desperation.