If someone doesn't like Amazon using software they write, they can just outright disallow Amazon from using it in the copywrite license.

It's perfectly legal to say: "except for Amazon [and whoever], anyone can use this for any purpose, provided..."

Amazon won't intentionally use that software. It's not worth the potential legal liability.

That doesn't mean Amazon won't write their own version though if they think they need to at some point.

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gobdovan 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I am saying this is exactly what's happening, but with more robust language. If you disallow Amazon, maybe there is a third party that offers our services to Amazon. So Amazon-the-string is not the bogeyman; the concern is the resale or hosted-service arrangement they can access.

So you see formulations that target infrastructure resale rather than specific entities, such as:

"For the avoidance of doubt, the following scenarios are not permitted under the license:

* A managed service that lets third party developers ... register their own [SERVICE] service endpoints and invoke them through that managed service."

"You may not provide the software to third parties as a hosted or managed service, where the service provides users with access to any substantial set of the features or functionality of the software."

"If you make the functionality of the Program or a modified version available to third parties as a service, you must make the Service Source Code available via network download to everyone at no charge, under the terms of this License [...] where 'Service Source Code' is defined broadly to include the entire hosting stack (monitoring, backups, etc.) to ensure a level playing field"

	▲	djoldman 2 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		> I find myself holding back private research because I don't want to provide free R&D for a value-extraction machine that is already efficient enough. If someone wants to release technology in a way that makes it publicly viewable but restricts its use, they can do that. If they don't want to release it, they don't have to. Additionally, publicly released technology destroys patentability, if that's the objective. I don't understand what one would want to achieve that can't be achieved here.
	▲	Cpoll 3 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		> If you disallow Amazon, maybe there is a third party that offers our services to Amazon. So Amazon-the-string is not the bogeyman; the concern is the resale or hosted-service arrangement they can access That's some acrobatics I suspect Amazon won't engage in, because communicating to the customer that your FooBarDB is managed in AWS but hosted by a third party is awkward. Amazon will happily reimplement your API with their backend, as they've done before.

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9 minutes ago | parent | prev [-]

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