Chris Ellis @intrbiz@bergamot.social

@hobu Right. The relative size of the monetary need of OSS against the rake AWS is hauling in is kind of the key factor. Mind you, "it's obscene" is a description that can be applied to situations all over our society. In general, those with the weaker hand are simply condemned to take what's on offer, no more.

@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.

Buying production services from organizations that lack code-level expertise in the underlying software seems risky, but it's a risk that right now a lot of IT shops are... if not "willing to take", are at least "willing to ignore".

An open question is how we create incentive structures larger that these huge companies. Some of it might be culture? The same IT culture that doesn't want to spin production software without a "support contract" could refuse to buy services from clouds that don't employ experts.

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.

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.

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.