[thtmnisamnstr]

I work at Earthly. We build a pretty popular open source build tool. I've worked for several companies that build OSS before Earthly as well.

At Earthly, a few years ago, the founder and CEO had these same concerns about big cloud providers and switched to a source available license. There was backlash, and after around a year, we switched back to open source. We've discussed things like this a lot, and believe an open source license is best for our product, our users, and our business.

The way that we differ from Hashicorp, Redis, and others that have switched to source available licenses is that the service we offer and generate revenue from isn't just a hosted version of our OSS. It's several services that natively integrate with our OSS but are not open source. This seems like one of the only ways a company that maintains popular OSS can survive without switching licenses: build great OSS that users love, build non-OSS services that integrate with and augment your OSS (and/or open up new use cases), and charge for those services.

If the service a company sells is just a hosted version of their OSS, even if it has a bunch of non-OSS bells and whistles added on, that company is at risk of a cloud provider eating their lunch unless they switch to a non-OSS license.