> The author continues:
>
> "Our view is that open-source software was never intended for cloud infrastructure companies to take and sell. That is not the original ethos of open source."
>
> which is a pretty astonishingly unsupported argument. Open source code has been incorporated into proprietary applications without giving back to the originating community since before the term open source even existed.
It depends on who you ask. The GNU AGPL certainly was intended not for cloud infrastructure companies to unconditionally take and sell. And as for non-cloud software, some projects like Wine used to be licensed permissively until they realised certain companies like Cedega [1] were making money off their work without contributing anything back, and switched to the LGPL instead.
Then OTOH you have permissive fundamentalists from parts of the US west coast that are already rich and whose livelihoods aren't dependent on money, and then of course are very happy to gather favour and reputation from giant tech monopolies by giving it all away for free with no pesky "reciprocal altruism" conditions for the lawyers to have to reason through.
If you ask the people behind the AGPL about the ethos of open source, you're asking the wrong people. They're pretty explicit about having a different ethos:
AGPL is a tiny subset of open source software, and even then it's intended to allow cloud infrastructure companies to sell covered works. It's certainly the case that there's an intent to prevent certain pieces of open source software from unconditionally being used in this way, but I don't think it's reasonable to argue that there was a fundamental incompatibility between the original ethos and what's happening now.
It depends on who you ask. The GNU AGPL certainly was intended not for cloud infrastructure companies to unconditionally take and sell. And as for non-cloud software, some projects like Wine used to be licensed permissively until they realised certain companies like Cedega [1] were making money off their work without contributing anything back, and switched to the LGPL instead.
Then OTOH you have permissive fundamentalists from parts of the US west coast that are already rich and whose livelihoods aren't dependent on money, and then of course are very happy to gather favour and reputation from giant tech monopolies by giving it all away for free with no pesky "reciprocal altruism" conditions for the lawyers to have to reason through.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cedega_(software)