> AWS could have really helped the maintainer with a single sentence and they didn't.

It's not befitting a large enterprise like AWS to tell their prospective customers that they are just wrapping their infra around free software in their marketing copy. If that single sentence even slightly impresses upon .1% of their potential customers that they ought to spin it up on their own infrastructure, obviating their need to pay for the service, that's plenty of disincentive to add the message.

That’s not as clear cut as your post may make it seem. Some users (me, for example) are more inclined to use a hosted service of some open source software than of some proprietary piece. Because that gives me a migration option if the providers service no longer fits my needs. For example, I’m paying four digits a month for some hosted Postgres database.

Misses the point. The marketing copy there is to bamboozle the uninformed into opening their wallets. If you are better informed, you already know that AWS plagiars pretty much all it's services from open-source. A smaller player catering to a tech audience might add open source to its bullet points as some sort of virtue signalling, but that's no benefit to the established megalith that is AWS.

Amazon's entire cloud business revolves around providing managed infrastructure as an alternative to self hosted solutions, so I don't think that is really a secret regardless.

Also, consider that they rely on having a positive reputation to attract engineering talent and also to continue to get third party developers to release their infrastructural code under permissive licenses.

>Part of OSS is about trust and reputation.

If trust and reputation were enough, we would not need licenses. The GPL is great and had the impact it did exactly because it forced people to do things.

I appreciate the underlying sentiment, but I disagree. When I contribute to OSS it's my choice to and I want the right to let anyone do whatever they want with code even if I never exercise that right.

Personally, I think OSS licences should be changed to prohibit unpaid use by any entity that has a single stakeholder worth more than a billion dollars. That way the startups and medium sized businesses around the world can benefit and the tech lottery winners pay something reasonable ($1m a year, say) to support OSS.

There is the same argument that people who want apprenticeship use. They want to work for a company and learn, but company won't hire them because they don't have money to pay for "idle" worker and the overhead to teach them. But this is for the greater good. In the past you had companies who used their market share in particular city to drive wages down and people had a choice either work for them and starve or move to different city. Minimum wage stops this, at a cost of some people being unable to work for free. I can accept that.

There will be projects for sure that would love their software were used by AWS and other companies without paying them, but that will only create a race to the bottom. We should stop exploitation of engineers by these giant companies.

> The model where company makes money off of someone else's work without paying them should be illegal.

So, once an author is dead, it should be illegal to sell anything they created? Or should ownership rights in content for the estate last forever?

Your idea is terrible when examined in detail.

This is an edge case, but for sure they would have family members who would inherit the titles and in an event of absence of such people then the state should take ownership.

Wait, I should be forced to give the state control over my creation, instead of being able to make it free to everyone, forever? Monstrous.

You want to make permissive licenses illegal or what? That's ridiculous.

Pick something like the MariaDB or CockroachDB license if you don't want Amazon to provide a hosted version of your software.

Yes it should be illegal to use OSS in SaaS platforms without paying the OSS contributors.