Thread by @QuinnyPig

Now that I'm back from vacation, this is worth a small thread.

Short answer: Yes but you don't want to do it.

https://twitter.com/jbfletch_/status/1452779211681378308

You can fork the SSPL or Elastic license or what have you to only include @awscloud, but it's 1. not Open Source® so people will yell at you for it, and 2. it betrays a significant misunderstanding about how AWS works.

Let's pretend that we're talking about `cowsay`, an open source tool that's been around for decades, is written in Perl, and outputs text in terminals like this.

It's GPL 3, and that won't do. So let's assume that they relicense it to an "Everyone but AWS" license, and let's further assume that AWS is dead set on launching this as a managed service.

This won't stop them, because even without the license change that's not how it works.

Everything @awscloud does has to scale, respect their permissions models, have rate limiting applied, etc. Every team doesn't rebuild all of these things, they work with underlying foundational services that have their own peculiarities.

This isn't a `git clone` into production. They fundamentally have to rebuild the thing almost from scratch.

They know what environment they're running it in, so multi-platform support can get tossed.

Then get it working with IAM, the billing system, support tags and CloudFormation, and then finally launch it as AWS Bovinity (with Cowsay compatibility).

It'll have the same API, the same outputs, but almost no code in common.

So to review:
* AWS will still compete with you
* Open source people will be mad at you
* Half of the internet will make fun of you.

I don't see the upside here, but you do you.

"I don't want THAT person using my code but everyone else is fine" is a strategy that's doomed to failure. Open source is not a business model, it's a strategy.