Historically, when businesses adopted open source software they would contribute upstream. Cloud vendors changed that model. It's interesting that attitudes about this behavior have changed.
They did? Which fraction of bash users (for example) contributed anything upstream? I am betting significatly less than 1%.
I am not sure why people suddenly get outraged about cloud. Most webhosting providers in the last 20 years had business criticaly dependent on Linux kernel and Apache. Almost none of them contibuted anything to those projects. And people were not complaining.
> I am not sure why people suddenly get outraged about cloud
Because now we are in the part of the business cycle where companies merge into a few huge sellers.
I couldn't name most of the webhost providers from 20 years ago, but Amazon is literally a household name.
So now it's not "A few Geocities knock-offs are using PHP for free and making a few bucks off a few people" it's "One of the biggest companies ever is making (seemingly) tons of profit off of almost everyone in the software industry."
Also the fact that in the last 20 years FOSS really succeeded in its mission - Proprietary software on the desktop is a joke now. The frontline has been pushed back to network apps where the backend is proprietary and the frontend is throw-away code that's useless without API keys.
So "stuff on the web" has gone from a low-profit novelty to 90+% of all software revenue.
I won't cite anything because we're talking about feelings. This is probably what the average 30-ish programmer feels about the situation, and if I got the facts wrong, I doubt anyone else is looking at these facts before deciding how to feel about AWS' marketshare.
Back then OSS was more volunteer labor based, or red hat style business models based on support contracts etc. So there was maybe less expectation of monetizing OSS directly.
These days the conflict seems to be about big cloud vendors productizing OSS code made by SaaS vendors, thus directly competing with them. It seems more like an economic argument (we want to get paid for the OSS we create) dressed up as an ideological one (OSS is about community, or whatever).
Come on, we are programmers. Tradition is undefined behavior and out of spec.
If you expect contributions, _get it in writing_. Copyleft was always the way to assert what you expected without this passive-aggressive "The user MAY contribute code to us or MAY just reap huge profit and contribute nothing."
> Historically, when businesses adopted open source software they would contribute upstream.
This is completely inaccurate. The vast majority of changes to non-Free open source code, let alone the wider software that has subsumed them, does not get contributed back.
