This breakdown hits hard because it’s not just about business models — it’s about trust.
Open source succeeded because it created shared public infrastructure. But hyperscalers turned it into extraction infrastructure: mine the code, skip the stewardship.
The result? We’ve confused “open” with “free-for-the-powerful.”
It’s time to stop pretending licenses are enough. This is about incentives, governance, and resilience. The next generation of “open” has to bake in counterpower — or it’s just a feeding trough for monopolies.
Before moving from permissive licences to non-open-source licences (because they have exceptions for TooBigTech), an easy step would be to use copyleft licences, wouldn't it?
> Grafana's a great example of this. AWS and Azure _could_ have sold the unmodified AGPL Grafana as a service or published their modified versions, but instead, they both struck proprietary licensing and co-marketing agreements with Grafana Labs.
Open source succeeded because it created shared public infrastructure. But hyperscalers turned it into extraction infrastructure: mine the code, skip the stewardship.
The result? We’ve confused “open” with “free-for-the-powerful.”
It’s time to stop pretending licenses are enough. This is about incentives, governance, and resilience. The next generation of “open” has to bake in counterpower — or it’s just a feeding trough for monopolies.