If you open source something, the rich trillion dollar companies just steal it.
If you're okay with that, that's cool. But they'll profit off of your work and labor. And the worst part is that at scale, the advantages of the sum total of open source is used to compete with you and put price pressure on your salary and career options. To rephrase that, the hyperscalers are in a position to leverage open source to take advantage of market opportunities you cannot, and they can use that to compete with your business or competing businesses that might otherwise pay you better.
Open source needs anti-Google/Amazon/Microsoft clauses.
Yes, it does! The "problem" with AGPL3 is that it has no carve-out for companies smaller than Amazon, Microsoft, or Google. If you use AGPL, you have to open source your entire stack.
Not everyone thinks infectious copyleft / free software is a problem. But it will mean that if you use AGPL3, every part of your stack has to be open. That doesn't work for everyone.
This is why "equitable source" / "fair source" is gaining traction. You can use a license like Apache and add in clauses with MAU/ARR/Hyperscaler limits that allows practically everyone else to use your software.
No, SSPL requires you to open source your entire stack. That's why the OSI and FSF rejected it.
AGPLv3 says, if you modify the software and put it on a network, you have to provide a link for anyone accessing the software to download the modified source. There's numerous drafting and technical problems with this arrangement[0] but the only parts of your stack you have to release are the parts that are actually part of the program covered by AGPLv3.
The "strong copyleft" strategy[1] is to identify a specific freedom-restricting behavior we don't like and prohibit just that. We're not saying "Amazon is not allowed to use this software", we're saying "Anyone who turns this software into a service needs to provide a way to fork the service and get the software back without losing anything". If such a copyleft license happens to scare a company into buying license exceptions, that's a happy accident.
In contrast equitable source doesn't say anything about freedom, it just says "these people need to pay a license fee". That's not FOSS, that's shareware. In FOSS, free-riding is not a bug. The problem with AWS isn't that they aren't paying a license fee, it's that they are building roach motels out of community projects.
[0] I'd link to Hector Martin's incredibly informative Mastodon posts regarding the subject, but he deleted his account after crashing out of LKML. As a substitute for that, I'll summarize my hazy memories:
- The intended compliance mechanism is to make your app a quine; but that only makes sense for webapps written in PHP/Python/etc. Someone actually put AGPLv3 on an Ethernet stack - how do you comply with that?
- It's unclear how license compliance works in a pull request driven Git workflow. If you're running the server locally for testing, and someone accesses it, have you violated the license?
- You can filter out the source offer with an HTTP proxy not covered by AGPLv3. That seems like a very wide loophole which the FSF apparently believes would work.
