Cloud companies pay by hiring developers to improve opensource.
This way everybody using opensource benefits. The original opensource contributers benefit twice: their software gets improved, and they have marketable skills as cloud companies will be interested to hire them to work on opensource projects.
You mean Cloud Companies are using the wealth created from hosting other's OSS to finance their own OSS efforts.
By no means are their OSS investments altruistic, Cloud companies by far benefit the most from OSS and no OSS developers aren't winning. Being able to hire OSS developers using funds generated from hosting their OSS efforts is some weird definition of winning, which they're using towards strengthening the software ecosystem around their cloud infrastructure - increasing its value.
The power and value of OSS is swinging sharply away from Indie OSS developers towards the major tech cloud monopolies - where they can now afford to outspend, out compete, out reach and out last any competing Indie OSS efforts.
If you look at linux, the biggest part of the source code has been created by professional developers employed by large companies (ibm, google, intel, oracle).
Without the backing and investments of commercial companies, Linux would not be the success it currently is. So in the end everyone benefits in some way, although maybe not financially.
Same goes for a lot of other succesfull opensource projects: without commercial backing it would not be as succesfull.
> By no means are their OSS investments altruistic
why does anything have to be altruistic? Why can't a company invest in OSS selfishly? The results are the same - more OSS available for anybody else to use.
> OSS developers aren't winning.
what's "winning" here? Is winning gaining financial profit from OSS? Is winning gaining user/market share? Is winning just merely being employed to do what you want to (i.e., employed to contribute to OSS)? And why is any one of those definitions more worthy than any other?
It doesn't, parent is suggesting everyone benefits when cloud providers use their accumulated wealth to hire people to work on their OSS investments as some kind of justification for the consolidation of wealth from OSS happening around cloud monopolies.
It doesn't benefit everyone, it benefits anyone using their proprietary and OSS products and cloud services. It definitely doesn't benefit existing OSS projects who are seeing their innovations replicated by full-time resources or OSS developers working on competing projects.
This is _free software_ we're talking about. The concept of doing it for money itself is quite asinine. Now, using it to established yourself as a domain expert (exposure) and then capitalizing w/ a consulting business makes sense.
The core issue is that consulting scales at O(n) where n is your personal time investment. It's not like offering a service where you spend all your time working on the service and get to experience exponential growth.
Basically, if you choose to commit to free software / OSS, you can't expect to get directly paid for it. Now, I know that that's not always ideal and ends up in tragedy-of-the-commons situations where the OSS devs don't get paid enough, but that's the reality of the situation to me.
Restrictive licenses don't solve the problem, because these same cloud behemoths can just pull an open distro on you.
Free in software is not about getting paid. Money is not the problem. You can expect getting paid as much as you want, you just have to let other people access code, change and distribute it as they wish.
Thinking it is "free as in free beer" is shallow. I don't need any of those crap android apps even if they are free, I want to have ability to see those apps code so I can see if they are sending my private data somewhere, and I have to have ability to remove that code. I can even pay license fee if I find some app useful, if price is to high I find alternative or just don't use it.
It does not say I cannot ask for money for my code, it also does not say wanting money for my code is something bad.
The other side is that you probably will have hard time chasing people to pay you, so in essence you won't be able to get much out of it, but that is just side effect.
This way everybody using opensource benefits. The original opensource contributers benefit twice: their software gets improved, and they have marketable skills as cloud companies will be interested to hire them to work on opensource projects.