Google has such a much better reputation when it comes to contributing to and understanding open source. It’s unfair to Google to put Amazon above them.
Heck AWS is the sole reason all these projects needed to go through these license changes to prevent AWS from completely destroying their business models.
Google had a better reputation. But these days I’m really not convinced they’re significantly better than Amazon.
Weirdly I’d put Microsoft above modern-Google, and that’s still a low bar.
What business model do MIT licensed projects even have? If you want to offer support contracts and actually make people use them, don't use MIT. You can't have you cake (accepting public contributions and free labor) and eat it (sole profiteering) too.
> If you want to offer support contracts and actually make people use them, don't use MIT. You can't have you cake (accepting public contributions and free labor) and eat it (sole profiteering) too.
I can't speak to how successful it is, but Daniel/Curl have been running with this model[0][1] for years. Probably not too different from 'drh and SQLite[2][3].
[0] https://curl.se/support.html
[1] https://rock-solid.curl.dev/
[2] https://sqlite.org/support.html
[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49272832
RMS addressed the business model from the very beginning: it's services and consulting. He practiced what he preached.
You might think that's got a very low ceiling. But, even though it's a bad example in many ways, OpenAI showed that the ceiling is very high. And if you're morally flexible even higher.
RMS promotes GPL, not MIT licensed software.
When a bigger entity (e.g. AWS) decides to undercut the original creator/vendor (e.g. redis,elastic search), MIT code des not help.
RMS would probably agree with you and think that I'm apostate. But there's an open source license for the full spectrum of software authors' preferences. Depending on the circumstances some could turn out to be a poor choice.
I know some lawyers who specialize in these choices. Everyone thinks their choice doesn't smell, but there are the resources to make informed choices.
Actually dual license, those that want industry friendly license can get as much as they are willing to give upstream.
With MIT there isn't much to goan with business comptiable licensing.
There the question turns to "you may sue me, if it breaks" as reasoning. In reality sueing will rarely work, but having a business contract satisfies the company's board and insurance about using the software over an "AS IS"-license alone.
It helps just fine. The original software is still there, available for anyone to use for free. AWS et al can't take that away from us, no matter what they choose to do with their fork.
When they say "doesn't help", they're talking about the developers of the original software you want to use for free getting to eat food and have a roof over their head.
It has an extremely low ceiling. You literally cannot make consumer-targeted software if you want to survive while writing open-source code. Services and consulting is strictly B2B, and services and consulting for open-source software is capable of supporting a population of like 1% of existing software developers. Advocating for this dogmatic ideal that would cull the field by 99% is ridiculous.
I don't know how you came to OpenAI as an example given that they famously succeeded while going closed-source with the release of ChatGPT.
Red Hat grew on GPL licensed projects to become a $34 billion business. Canonical does the same except it’s Ubuntu not RHEL and charges more than Red Hat.
You really underestimate the value of support contracts.
GPL is not MIT. If your software is GPL, you can sell it relicensed as MIT for income.
Doesn’t matter. When companies pay for support contracts they don’t care whether the code is GPL or MIT. They care about the support they get.
You can only do this if you own the copyright for all contributions.
I'm not seeing how MIT licensing has anything to do with your ability to use support contacts as a business model. Yeah, nothing constrains the potential customer to purchase support, but that's just as true of GPL licensed software. I can download GPL software and never pay a dime for a support contract, just like MIT software.
..a strategy valid in the good ol' days when a complete rewrite of the currently non-licenseable non-protectable underlying desings and ideas would not cost you 200$ on tokens to reimplement in a different or even in the same language.. maybe SW patents will be a thing soon .. and inadvertently become another nail in the coffin of FOSS and SW development in general, who knows