Comment by mumblemumble

It's been said that the best way to fortify your business is to use your clout to make the world inhospitable for adjacent businesses.

As someone who is not currently in the cloud, that idea strikes me as being very pertinent to what's happening here. Increasingly many technologies are becoming cloud-only, or have non-cloud offerings that are decidedly second-class. Elastic offers on-prem support. I doubt Amazon will be doing the same with OpenSearch.

It may be a subtle effect, but it's pushing the world in a direction that makes me uncomfortable. If it's harder for non-cloud-based companies to maintain non-cloud-based offerings, then that will push the industry even more toward being dominated by SaaS products. And these products often leave clients and users locked in, with limited control over their own data, and, by extension, reduced ability to control their own fates. What I worry about is that we may be witnessing a return of Embrace, Extend, Extinguish, only in a new form that's even more dangerous because it's harder to see.

I appreciate the discomfort people have about the SSPL. It is a departure from the original ideas behind FOSS. But, at least as I see it, those open source principles were never an end in and of themselves. They're a means to a greater end: digital autonomy. To the extent that very large companies seem to be learning how to co-opt FOSS in order to re-assert control, FOSS's ability, in its current incarnation, to serve that end may be waning.