Open source means surrendering your monopoly over commercial exploitation
An angle I don&#x27;t see often enough -- the recent thread on Elastic&#x27;s change in license was full of a lot of people bashing AWS, and as much as I dislike their practices, you can&#x27;t blame sharks for doing what sharks do. If you don&#x27;t want your software to be usable by everyone for whatever purpose (even purposes you disagree with), then don&#x27;t publish it under F&#x2F;OSS or similar permissive licenses -- let everyone know your intentions from the start.<p>As much as I dislike AWS&#x27;s heft (which I think allows it to muscle in on spaces it isn&#x27;t the best at, and people will happily choose worse products because they&#x27;re &quot;backed&quot; by AWS), I also think there&#x27;s a lot of value in the F&#x2F;OSS world to be exploited, and I&#x27;d like to do the exploiting someday. I&#x27;ll leave it to others on whether it&#x27;s right to draw the line at size of corporation, but I&#x27;d be just as &quot;in the wrong&quot; as AWS is.<p>There&#x27;s no reason both the community and the corporate interests trying to profit (entrepreneurs who want to offer hosted versions included) can&#x27;t have a symbiotic rather than parasitic relationship -- all it takes is returning some of the revenue to the appropriate open source projects and supporting them. Postgres and the related companies have been making it work for a long time now. I think part of what&#x27;s exacerbating this parasitic relationship might be the VC model -- if you make some open-core software, take a bunch of VC money (or don&#x27;t and simply overstretch your reach), and now need to find some hypergrowth (tm) to keep the house of cards the right side up, maybe it makes more sense that the relationship would be more parasitic than symbiotic.<p>A lot of newer developers are about to find out the difference between F&#x2F;OSS and shareware.