Elastic and Amazon reach agreement on trademark infringement lawsuit

Oracle didn't build their company in the style of AWS Redis, that cloning maneuver. Oracle's database was a pioneer. Oracle didn't get where they are by cloning open source and claiming it as their own. Despite the numerous bad things that can be said about Oracle's culture, that's not one of the key negatives about Oracle.

Step back from FOSS for a second.

I think most people would agree that there’s somewhat of a moral issue with just taking someone else’s open source software and just hosting it and making billions, with nothing for the creators, because you are a megacorp who is good at hosting.

Now, is there a way to solve that and have the benefits of FOSS?

Both Mongo and MariaDB have tried to address this with licensing - MariaDB seems to have done this much less clumsily than Mongo, but both still had FOSS advocates shrieking

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EDIT to include response to below comments so everyone doesn't keep repeating the same things:

> Either your product is fully free and you accept that people can fork it, even Amazon, or you choose a restrictive license. You can't make "free" (as in libre) compatible with "but".

> I can totally see that you think this is unfair, but they did allow it and they were perfectly happy when being FOSS brought them market share. You have to take the good with the bad

> If you have a moral qualm with bigcorps using your work for free, you don’t license in such a way that they can. Make your own license, or slap AGPL3 on it - either way, no bigcorp touches it.

> But you cannot be mad when you say “I release this code under these terms” and AWS takes you up on your offer.

If everyone stomps their feet and says "there's no solution, otherwise it's not OSS!" then the end result is only going to be a lot less open-source software.

I'm not asking if someone who wrote code and chose an existing OSS license that allows any possible usage has any real recourse once they want to make money off of it - obviously not.

I am asking, can we find a way to ensure software creators are compensated while still having the generally-recognized benefits of FOSS?

> Don't you think there's a moral issue expecting free contributions to something which only you are allowed to monetize?

Nowhere in OSS licenses does it include the expectations of free contributions

> And how can you satisfy users to the greatest extent while also preventing them from using the provider that is best able to meet their needs?

Again, can we just find a way for the creators to be compensated?

I'd love for the OSS to be available as a hosted solution to be available on every cloud provider, including if the original creators choose to provide a cloud hosting.

I'd also love for the original creators to be able to get some sliver of the money AWS/Google/Azure are making off of it.

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To me it seems like if you were to start a business around your open-source code right now, you would be smart to do one of these two things:

1. a MariaDB/CockroachDB BSL approach, where the newest versions are BSL, with a restriction that you can't provide a product where you just host our software without paying us, then all code automatically is fully open-source (GPL or whatever) after x amount of time, or x major version releases.

  - this comes with the danger of all the bad PR and gnashing of teeth that comes with non-pure-OSS licenses, or people just not adopting it because they dislike or don't understand the license

  - this seems even more dangerous, that you have to be distracted on such things that are not the core product in order to defend against ending up like Docker, with everyone using it and no one paying you a dime.