I’ve always felt guilty by taking for granted the rare breed of virtuous humans that provide free excellent software without relying on advertising. Let’s change that and pay, how much would I “lose” anyway?
The real outrage is big tech clouds like amazon taking open source software for free and bundling it up in AWS services that cost a lot of money.
If they would contribute back to the authors, they would become rich, but of course not…
AWS isn’t charging for the software, they’re charging to let you run stuff on their hardware
If that were solely true, there would be a lot more competition in the field right now. Amazon, (and to a much lesser extent the other 2 big names, GCP and Azure) are so massive not because they have a lot of power (plenty of other companies like digital ocean or OVM have plenty of scaling power too)— but because the integrations between their products are so seamless. Most of that functionality has a foundation in FOSS software that they’ve built on top of.
Which, by itself, is fine. But their contributions to open source are very one-handed and pale in comparison to how much they benefit out of it.
Hell, my company is no different. They allocate one day out of the year as “open source day” where devs can contribute back to open source projects on company time. But it must be something we already use.
No personal development. No non-essential libraries.
We make literally millions off of these libraries and we don’t even contribute monetarily.
If these companies gave even 0.01% of their revenue to these essential libraries, they’d never even have to ask for money.
True, but AWS and the cloud in general likely would’ve never evolved without top notch free software, i.e. Linux, because the cost would’ve been prohibitive. I am on a team that runs a small public cloud and there are many systems needed to support the cloud, it’s not just the instances/VMs.
They’re charging you to run your software on their software on their hardware. Aws doesn’t just host a box you can ssh into, their have an enormous platform with tons of services (literally the biggest in the world). Their software/hardware are inextricable and nothing without the other.
