The "main event", to me, is to what extent AWS (and Azure and Google), who make serious bank by spinning open source, engage with the challenge of keeping the software they spin alive.

When the companies that are making billions off open source are contributing less than the companies making millions, or (gulp) the contractors and small businesses making thousands... that's not a legal problem or a licensing problem.

But it's a structural problem that can really only be solved by the big companies stepping up and saying, "we recognize we have a unique role to fill here, as the ones extracting the most value from this ecosystem". We cannot MAKE them do it. They have to WANT to do it.

@pwramsey The currency that matters for them is leverage, and a project like GDAL actually has quite a bit of it. It gives favored capability like /vsis3 and /vsigcs that few in its community actually need. The project could pull it out and risk a fork that wouldn't immediately cause everyone to jump onto their "true open source" fork because the alternative isn't some BSL silliness, it's the community that's actually supporting the software.

@hobu Perhaps a realization that bad actors should be forced to "talk to the hand" will spread more widely in OSS. https://github.com/qgis/QGIS-Enhancement-Proposals/issues/272

@hobu Unfortunately any given organization contains multitudes, and the net effect might be punishing allies in an organization for the crimes of completely separate divisions.

@pwramsey That's just it. Open source happens at the individual level, not the organization one, and organizations like AWS take advantage of that fact.

AWS is wants to say and act like it's just like "any other individual actor", but it's not. It's the toll bridge where the value from a lot of these tools is extracted. Same for GCS/Azure.

And it's all bloviation for what in the end, even as total support to open source by all could vendors in total, is budget dust.