Comment by brainless
4 years ago
I feel this is a very scary trend starting. I have not come across a single founder in the last 5-6 years who does not start with AWS credits or is not craving for them.
AWS is a monopoly and they use their cash to buy early customers. Initially it was Amazon's money, but now AWS has enough cash of their own to push whatever they wish to. The same goes for Google and Microsoft.
AWS directly building up the software side of what started out as IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) is only going to hurt software vendors. We can only expect new software players or ones with low capital to restrict their licenses even more.
Open source licenses are not only for ideological freedom, but very necessary for companies (end users) to integrate and modify products on their own. We will migrate more toward source-available licenses instead since big giants are going to corner the small companies.
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I find it fine for software to not be open source. Source-available but closed-source (in terms of freedom) is perfectly fine from a commercial standpoint and should be the gold-standard for mission-critical software in the backend. The problem comes from companies touting their software as open source purely for the marketing aspect in order to bring in customers and get free work done by people who don't get paid.