Why Traditional Open Source Licensing Is Breaking Under Modern Cloud Hosting

When the MIT and BSD licenses were drafted decades ago, software distribution meant shipping source tarballs or CD-ROMs. If someone modified your code, they distributed the binary, and community norms generally protected original creators.

Today, cloud hyperscalers can fork an independent engineer’s open-source database, wrap it in a proprietary managed dashboard, resell it to millions of enterprise customers, and give zero dollars back to the creator who wrote the code.

This has triggered a wave of license changes across Redis, CockroachDB, and HashiCorp.

As an independent software builder running Ryla Labs, I want my code to be inspected, learned from, and modified freely by students and builders. But we must acknowledge reality: if independent developers cannot earn a sustainable living from the software they create, the entire ecosystem suffers.