this post was submitted on 21 Jan 2024
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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....
This is why the GPL is so important. It doesn't require them to donate, but it does require them to release any bugfixes they made or software they made using it
AWS isn't charging for the software, they're charging to let you run stuff on their hardware
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.
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.
Yeah the software being bundled in default images is just a convenience.
Most places that are serious about using AWS will be shipping their own images anyway