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> Because a big company like Amazon has produced almost no open source work

This may have been true a decade ago, but things are quite different now.

> compared to how much it has benefited from open source.

This is the nature of digital public goods. We are all going to disproportionately benefit from digital public goods relative to what can be produced as new digital public goods. No one will ever, EVER be able to "contribute proportionately" given the endless bounty of software made freely available for all to use.

> If that was the standard, so many of AWS services will spend all their reinvent time giving credits to their source OSS projects.

The observant should notice a change in this over the years. For example, the announcement for Amazon Q Code Transformation [1] acknowledged that OpenRewrite was used under the covers, even though it was an implementation detail that didn't have to be disclosed...

Of course these disclosures and good-faith intentions to engage on open-source community terms under long-established community norms don't always work out the way we hope. [2]

[1] https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/upgrade-your-java-applicati...

[2] https://github.com/spring-projects/spring-tools/issues/1443



> No one will ever, EVER be able to "contribute proportionately" given the endless bounty of software made freely available for all to use.

so it sounds like we need a license mechanism that enforces this, fairly, based on potential ability to contribute

idea: a benchmark to give a required level of contributions, maybe a logistic function of revenue generated/company size and time since initial usage

and if you fall beneath it, your license is terminated

carefully calibrated such that a burden is only placed on very large companies


Just make it closed source (or source-available) and give out no-cost licenses how you see fit. You are the author, you decide what to do with your code. This is a well-supported model too, plenty of products are like that.

There are plenty of licenses around, lack of alternatives isn't why people use MIT or Apache.




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