If Timescale were AGPL Amazon would be free to just run it as a service for profit and all they need to do is publish their modifications to it, if they make any. Amazon has no problem running all kinds of other open source software for profit, and this is what TSL is specifically designed to prevent.
Conan_Kudo|5 years ago
What everyone seems to miss here is that the GNU Affero General Public License offers the ability for people to make that choice. Cloud providers would be forced into an ugly situation if almost every single XaaS codebase switched to AGPL. Their business model depends on being able to make minor investments to provide things people want as a service and not share it with the community.
However, if the AGPL was normalized and used more often, cloud providers would be in a situation where they'd either have to A) build everything of theirs on their own if they don't like the license or B) use the software people want, release their improvements back to the community, and everyone benefits.
It's amazing how everyone has forgotten why Linux won over all the other server, mobile, and edge platforms, and is slowly inching to dominate everything else. The terms underlying most of the core Linux system software, including the kernel obviously, require things incorporating it to be released with usable sources to the public. That is what enabled individuals to sustain a project and make it into the successful juggernaut it is today.
But because Google has managed to poison the well with AGPL, we're in a situation today where "business-friendly" permissive licenses like the Apache Software License are used and companies are surprised when they get sucked dry by cloud providers abusing the properties of that license.
Companies building open source software should expect one of two things: money or code. Both are intrinsically quite valuable to them, and they should take care to nurture that those are the two valid options.