Well yeah of course, it's a direct contradiction of the rising tide lifts all boats principle. Do you think Kubernetes would have any traction at all if it had a clause that it couldn't be used on AWS?
If it can't be adopted by the industry as a whole, then it can't be considered an industry standard. It wouldn't fly at my organization anyway, not even looking up what PolyForm is.
Do you believe the fat ugly monster that is ElasticSearch would've had anywhere near its current adoption rates if it had a non-OSI license from the start?
It would've been completely overshadowed by some other Lucene-based wrapper or maybe some even better alternative would've come along earlier.
I built on Elastic early on over Solr and several others because it was open source and seemed to be better. I would have selected a different Lucene wrapper if I had known where Elastic was going.
As far as I can see, this doesn't say it can't be used on AWS, it only says Amazon can't launch its own service that uses this software to compete with itself. It's too short to really tell what "compete" entails, though.
You are correct, this is meant as an AWS/GCP/Azure preventor. ElasticSearch situation. That is, AFAIU, the intention of the license I adopted. The "examples" part spells it pretty directly out, as I also try to do here: https://centiservice.com/license/
I end up regretting it every time I weigh into this mess, but that line of reasoning drives me so crazy that this just baits me into it
It is some yeowsers level hubris of every one of these folks who adopts some "source available" license because "Amazon gonna use our software for freeeeee, we go brokkkke". My company goes head-to-head with an existing Amazon closed-source offering and our stance is that if we can't out-customer-service, out-price, and generally make something more awesome than Amazon, that's on us, not because Amazon took our software and somehow ... forked it? innovated in a way we couldn't by using it?
In the meantime, during the days up until Amazon Armageddon Day(tm), you don't have any bugfixes from the software engineers in the trenches trying to use your software, the cutesy license carte-blanc rules out its use in a non-trivial number of shops that would otherwise, and it ends up generating a lot of threads during every discussion which aren't "wow, that's awesome you made transactional JMS -- I can't wait to try that out in my use case!" where you do shine
I am so sick of people pointing to the NOT OUT OF BUSINESS Elastic as the case study of "Amazon took our stuff, now we broke". AWS offers managed Kafka, also, and Confluent seems to be doing just fine. We use the Apache licensed Kafka not because we hate Confluent, but because it's infinitely easier to deploy a non-locked-in docker image than to deal with licensing keys in our deployment strategy. We similarly avoid Amazon Managed Kafka because it's pricing is stupid and the kinds of risks it drives down are not our risks
An alternative viewpoint of AWS taking your software is "wow, what a market validation! Now come get the 5 versions newer release from the experts who built it."
I'm really in favor of something like that. AWS using your own FOSS software to choke your revenue stream is a blight on FOSS, so good for you for using that license.
If it can't be adopted by the industry as a whole, then it can't be considered an industry standard. It wouldn't fly at my organization anyway, not even looking up what PolyForm is.