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Are Large Cloud Providers a Threat To Open Source Vendors? (redmonk.com)
Stephen O'Grady, co-founder of the industry analyst firm RedMonk, asks whether open source vendors are marching towards an inevitable and damaging war with big cloud providers:
In the last twelve to eighteen months...a switch has been flipped. Companies have gone from regarding cloud providers like Amazon, Google or Microsoft as not even worth mentioning as competition to dreadful, existential threat. The fear of these cloud providers has become so overpowering, in fact, that commercial open source vendors have chosen -- against counsel, in many cases -- to walk down strategic paths that violate open source cultural norms, trigger massive and sustained negative PR and jeopardize relationships with developers, partners and customers. Specifically, commercial open source providers have increasingly turned to models that blur the lines between open source and proprietary software in an attempt to access the strengths of both, with the higher probability outcome of ending up with their weaknesses instead.
That commercial open source providers took these actions having been advised of these and other risks in advance says everything about how these businesses view their prospects in a world increasingly dominated by massive providers of cloud infrastructure and an expanding array of services that sit on top of that. The strategic decisions inarguably have major, unavoidable negative consequences, but commercial open source providers -- or their investors, at least -- believe that a lack of action would be even more damaging.
That commercial open source providers took these actions having been advised of these and other risks in advance says everything about how these businesses view their prospects in a world increasingly dominated by massive providers of cloud infrastructure and an expanding array of services that sit on top of that. The strategic decisions inarguably have major, unavoidable negative consequences, but commercial open source providers -- or their investors, at least -- believe that a lack of action would be even more damaging.
Unlike GPLv2, GPLv3 is explicitly compatible with AGPLv3. This means that a program is allowed to include both GPLv3 and AGPLv3 components, and if so, it must offer complete corresponding source code to users who interact with the program over a computer network even if the program itself is not distributed to the public. Oracle has changed the license of new versions of Oracle Berkeley DB to AGPLv3 in order to forbid its use in any program with a proprietary component. This allows Oracle to charge for exceptions.
GPLv3 does include a clause which appears to be an attempt to improve this situation.
Unfortunately, Richard Stallman also included a poison pill in GPLv3 which makes it risky for any organization to use GPLv3 if any part of their organization has a patent on anything. He wanted to use GPLv3 to kill patents, by making it so that anyone who has any patent can't safely use GPLv3 code. The result is that patents killed GPLv3 use.
Some will say "no, it's intended to mean you can't patent something in the code; you can have other patents". But that's not what it says. During the draft process we asked that it be clarified if that was indeed the intent. Stallman refused to change the wording to limit it's applicability to only contributions made by the person or company who has the patent.
Because Stallman refused to adjust the wording before releasing the version of GPLv3, this is the current situation:
I worked for a major university. Some departments in that university do a lot of research and development. The R&D is funded in part by patenting the useful results and licensing the patents to companies which make use of the R&D. If any other part of the university were to distribute GPLv3 code anywhere, at any campus, it would put all of the universities patents at risk. Someone, perhaps a competitor or perhaps someone who doesn't know anything about the patent, could invalidate the patent by contributing a module which makes use of it.
That doesn't happen with GPLv2, so any organization which has any patent on anything is safer using GPLv2 code. GPLv2 doesn't have a patent poison clause.
If GPLv4 changes the clause to say it only applies to code authored / contributed by the organization that has the patent, that would mostly fix the problem. That's what proponents of v3 *say* that that *intend*, but they haven't allowed the license to say that.