Cloud vendors have been strip-mining open source for years, yet judging by user and contributor sentiment on forums such as HN, and the lack of OSI-approved licensing innovation, there’s been no meaningful progress toward a solution. If anything, I get the feeling that the community is effectively more on the side of cloud vendors than on the side of authors. It seems the community at large doesn't care about authors' businesses suffering. Meanwhile, they largely don't oppose cloud vendors forking the latest open source version either.
AGPL protects better against cloud strip-mining than most opens source licenses, but doesn't solve the fundamental problem of big cloud vendors easily outcompeting authors' businesses. AGPL only compels source sharing when the software is modified and offered over a network. But cloud providers can sidestep that by hosting the unmodified version. They excel at operations at scale and sales. Most open source consumers seem to care more about benefiting from this than about the authors' struggles.
Fair source licenses — such as SSPL and Elastic License — while not OSI-compliant, are designed thoughtfully to balance authors' business and user needs, and don’t impact the vast majority of users. They often only restrict cloud-scale commercial hosting, not self-hosting or local use. Yet they trigger disproportionate outrage.
This is part of a broader problem: the community’s lack of empathy for authors. It is unsustainable. Open source maintainer burnout has been going on for a long time now. The "indie" open source author community is aging. Meanwhile, many big open source projects come from large coporations who use open source as a loss leader.
My impression is that:
1. the community at large is too stuck in ideological purity, in an age where the original FOSS ideology is a bad fit. Permissive licenses made sense when open source was a grassroots movement fighting for adoption — not when it’s powering trillion-dollar clouds.
2. People prioritize their own short-term interests too much.
Companies are doing open source because of the momentum we built over the past few decades. This momentum is being eroded by maintainer burnout, fragmented ecosystems, and declining trust between authors and users. Yet the open source consumer and authorities such as FSF and OSI effectively neglect indie author health. This is going to collapse one day.
If we want open source to survive as more than just free labor for cloud providers, we need a new movement—one that defends both user freedom and author sustainability.
AGPL protects better against cloud strip-mining than most opens source licenses, but doesn't solve the fundamental problem of big cloud vendors easily outcompeting authors' businesses. AGPL only compels source sharing when the software is modified and offered over a network. But cloud providers can sidestep that by hosting the unmodified version. They excel at operations at scale and sales. Most open source consumers seem to care more about benefiting from this than about the authors' struggles.
Fair source licenses — such as SSPL and Elastic License — while not OSI-compliant, are designed thoughtfully to balance authors' business and user needs, and don’t impact the vast majority of users. They often only restrict cloud-scale commercial hosting, not self-hosting or local use. Yet they trigger disproportionate outrage.
This is part of a broader problem: the community’s lack of empathy for authors. It is unsustainable. Open source maintainer burnout has been going on for a long time now. The "indie" open source author community is aging. Meanwhile, many big open source projects come from large coporations who use open source as a loss leader.
My impression is that:
1. the community at large is too stuck in ideological purity, in an age where the original FOSS ideology is a bad fit. Permissive licenses made sense when open source was a grassroots movement fighting for adoption — not when it’s powering trillion-dollar clouds.
2. People prioritize their own short-term interests too much.
Companies are doing open source because of the momentum we built over the past few decades. This momentum is being eroded by maintainer burnout, fragmented ecosystems, and declining trust between authors and users. Yet the open source consumer and authorities such as FSF and OSI effectively neglect indie author health. This is going to collapse one day.
If we want open source to survive as more than just free labor for cloud providers, we need a new movement—one that defends both user freedom and author sustainability.