Situations like this make me wonder why no one has created an open source license with a clause excluding multi billion dollar companies. If your company makes more than, say, $50 billion in revenue per year or something crazy like that, then you need to pay for a license. Everyone else can use the free license. Amazon in particular is well known to be aggressively anti-competitive, as we saw with the Diapers.com fia…
That creates problems for anyone who ever wants to sell their business to or sell services to any larger company. Which covers a lot of smaller companies. The license would trigger all sorts of legal red flags during due diligence for either case. And not just with the companies it's supposed to cover but any large company (ie: what if they one day trigger the clause, how well defined is the clause, what if they are…
We ran into that, sort of, although the only one it ultimately affected was the author of the free software that we wanted to use. We were a small company doing development for a major Japanese software distributor. He wanted a virtual CD product that would make images of your CD-ROMs and let you use those images. We were using zLib to compress the images, but he said it was too slow. zLib has settings to sacrifice some compression to gain speed, but they would not gain enough speed while maintaining the minimum amount of compression he wanted.
I found a zLib compatible library that some grad student at a nearby major university had written in assembly for speed. It was very good, handily beating zLib, and he even used the same assembler we used (Watcom). The library was GPL, which was not acceptable to the distributor we were writing for, so I contacted him about a different license.
We agreed on some reasonable price to use his library in that product, and some reasonable larger price for a license to use it in all our future products. But then he started worrying--our products were for Windows. What if we caught Microsoft's attention and they bought us, and his code ended up available for all of Microsoft to use.
He wanted to negotiate a license that would cover all of the kind of thing to make sure his code could not end up at Microsoft or some other big company. Negotiating that would require our CEO's involvement, and probably bringing in outside lawyers. The CEO did not have the time for that nor any interest in it, and told me to figure something else out.
I did. I went back to zLib, and I added a slider to our UI which went from 0 to 100, labeled something like "Faster ripping" on the 0 end and "Smaller Images" on the 100 end. If the slider was set to N when ripping an image, I used zLib at maximum compression setting on N out of every 100 sectors ripped and stored 100-N out of every 100 sectors ripped uncompressed. The distributor was delighted with this. (I have never been able to decide if I should be proud of this solution or deeply shamed by it).
25 years later, and nothing from then ended up at Microsoft or anywhere else, and that grad student lost out on several thousand easy dollars that I'm sure would have been very nice and useful for him to have.