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OSS is a great business model if you're one of the 3 multi-billion dollar major cloud vendors co's who are collectively the primary beneficiaries of everyone else's OSS investments since relatively no-one pays to acquire/use free OSS software, only to host it, so it's of course in their best interest to keep everything OSS so they can collect rent at the point where people pay to utilize its value - for hosting their production systems.

It's easy for AWS, Azure or GCP to be altruistic and suggests everything should be OSS for the betterment of humanity, since they've become the primary beneficiaries of the wealth created by OSS which benefits them more than anything else. Then use the profits to develop billion dollar cloud infrastructure moats to ensure a barrier to entry that prohibits anyone else from partaking in.

This is ultimately the core issue between companies behind developers of OSS software like Redis Labs, Confluent, Elastic.co, etc. They've put in the investment to build and support their OSS products but it's the cloud vendors end up reaping most of the revenue derived from it given they're the only entity Customers pay to host their production systems. This is what the extended OSS licenses are designed to target which are typically free for everyone else but prohibits the cloud vendors from absorbing all the rewards from hosting their software without revenue sharing anything back.




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