Amazon should pay money to the people who create the open source. Not necessarily because a license compels them to, but because it's the right thing to do. If they don't, then the ecosystem collapses.
A good example is RedHat. There is basically no money in simply selling operating system licenses anymore, but someone has to keep developing it. Amazon makes lots of money off of EC2 instances. They could easily throw a few million a year into paying kernel developers. But will they?
Are they just going to be a free rider, while keeping anyone else from being able to make any money too?
>Amazon should pay money to the people who create the open source. Not necessarily because a license compels them to, but because it's the right thing to do. If they don't, then the ecosystem collapses.
Elasticsearch is built on top of Lucene. When Elastic received triple digit millions in VC funding, did they pay the Lucene developers? They're not even Apache Foundation sponsors, as best as I can tell.
>Amazon makes lots of money off of EC2 instances. They could easily throw a few million a year into paying kernel developers. But will they?
Amazon contributes back to the Linux kernel. How much contribution is needed to make it "right"? How do we determine it? Does Amazon need to employ them directly, or sponsor projects? What about their Platinum sponsorship of the Apache Foundation?
Actually ElasticSearch is paying the salaries of a number of Lucene committers. At least they did so already about 5 years or so ago. Haven't followed things closely more recently.
Amazon do pay people to contribute to the kernel, and they have their own Linux distribution which when you poke it looks an awful lot like RHEL/CentOS but different due to some things Amazon add/change, so I'm not sure that's the greatest example. Red Hat probably aren't thrilled about that situation, but in the same breath are a larger company and not under the same pressure to simply survive at this point.
A good example is RedHat. There is basically no money in simply selling operating system licenses anymore, but someone has to keep developing it. Amazon makes lots of money off of EC2 instances. They could easily throw a few million a year into paying kernel developers. But will they? Are they just going to be a free rider, while keeping anyone else from being able to make any money too?