'Source available' is not open source, and that's okay

For a lot of developers, the current biggest failure of open source is the AWS/Azure/GCP problem. BigCloud has a tendency to just take well liked open source products, provide a hosted version of them and as a result they absolutely annihilate the market share of the entity that originally made the product (which usually made money by offering supported and hosted versions of the software). Effectively, for networked software (which is the overwhelming majority of software products these days) you might as well use something like BSD/MIT rather than any of the GPLs[0] because they practically have the same guarantees; it's just that the BSD/MIT licenses don't contain language that makes you think it does stuff it actually doesn't do. Non-networked software like kernels, drivers and most desktop software don't have this issue, so it doesn't apply.

Open source for that sort of product (which most of the big switches away from open source have been about) only further entrenches BigCloud's dominance over the ecosystem. It absolutely breaks the notion that you can run a profitable business on open source. BigCloud basically always wins that race even if they aren't cheaper because the company is using BigCloud already, so using their hosted version means cutting less yellow tape internally since the difficulty of getting people to agree on BigCloud is much lower compared to adding a new third party you have to work with.

The general response to this issue from the open source side tends to just be to accuse the original developers of being greedy/only wanting to use the ecosystem to springboard their own popularity.

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I should also note that this generally doesn't apply to the fight between DHH and Mullenweg that's described in the OP. DHH just wants to kick a hornets nest and get attention now that Omarchy isn't the topic du jour anymore - no BigCloud (or for this case, shared hosting provider is probably more likely) is going to copy a random kanban tool written in Ruby on Rails. They're copying the actual high profile stuff like Redis, Terraform and whatever other examples you can recently think of that got screwed by BigClouds offering their services in that way (shared providers pretty much universally still use the classic AMP stack, which doesn't support a Ruby project, immunizing DHHs tool from that particular issue as well). Mullenweg by contrast does have to deal with Automattic not having a stranglehold on being a WordPress provider since the terms of his license weren't his to make to begin with; b3/cafelog was also under GPL and WordPress inherited that. He's been burned by FOSS, but it's also hard to say he was surprised by it, since WP is modified from another software product.

[0]: Including the AGPL, it doesn't actually do what you think it does.

> They switch to source-available licenses because a FOSS license allows flush FAANGs to exploit them.

And then they die because they cut themselves off from the OSS community.

Most shared source companies don't actually fare that well. There's a history of these companies spawning new OSS competitors based on forks. Or just not gaining any traction at all.

The "boohoo amazon killed my business" thing isn't as widely spread as you think. They only offer a few hundred services. Several of those are based on open source things. If I were an investor, I'd be reluctant to invest in shared source companies. Unlikely to have long term stamina, extremely likely to be outpaced by some OSS thingy, likely to see users jump ship as soon as they can. I think a few investors probably learned that lesson the hard way.

Shared source from day 1 just means you probably end up running a niche business and are by definition not very investable. Usually these things if they get funded at all are doomed for some acquihire scenario where they end up in the hands of professional revenue milkers like IBM or Oracle. Nothing good happens to users of those projects when that happens. Developers leave in disgust and start new projects. It becomes abandon-ware.

A second argument here is that if Amazon thinks you are worth hosting in managed form, that means they see a multi billion $ market. This doesn't happen until after you are successful typically. And there are plenty of people who don't use Amazon who might still like to use the same stuff. It's a great validation that you have a valuable project and that there is a huge market for it. You just don't get to be the monopolist in that market.

There are millions of open source projects out there that are just fine. Most of those don't require VC funding, or IPOs, or other cash grab mechanisms to sustain themselves for a long time. Most of the really successful projects actually see active contributions from those FAANGs as well. E.g. MS is one of the most active contributors to the Linux kernel. Google as well. OSS actively used by FAANGs represents the most solid open source code out there. Guaranteed to be well supported for ages. Loads of active contributors; many of them paid for by those companies.

I will say I didn't disagree with DHH's use of "open source" as I will generally let it slide as its not "Open Source", the version that I attribute to following the Open Source Definition as set out by the Open Source Initiative

I agree that there are many who don't understand the distinction and assume that "Open Source" == "open source", and so I do agree that avoiding the use of "open source" where it instead means "non-OSD" makes sense

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The type of audience Immich targets, pretty fundamentally limits the appeal of any hosted solution, unlike a lot of the infrastructure-type of project a lot of these "big cloud taking my code" complaints come from.