Absurd. Providing a managed instance of open source software that’s complicated to manage is fine. It’s not AWS’s fault that Elastic did a bad job of selling into AWS accounts. They should have worked on their value prop.
AWS customers like that there's one bill and one account. Who wants to deal with multiple vendors if they don't have to? It isn't a level playing field when Amazon offers a service.
Amazon could have chosen a cooperative, long-term, strategy and shared some revenue with the authors for some quid-pro-quo, and the world and Amazon, would be better for it. Instead, Amazon chose to cook the goose that lays the golden eggs, now they have to figure it out themselves, and whole ecosystems of services they could have hosted are running away from them.
The reason historically it hasn’t been a level playing field is because Amazon have:
- The ability to invent new infrastructure to suit a need. For example, multi legged ENIs that provide the EKS control plane are simply not available to others,
- The ability to integrate with IAM natively,
- The ability to build common network architectures without outrageous costs (traffic over peering links being a good example since that is what basically all vendors have to do).
This is overthinking it. For nearly every given service, Amazon can just slap together a managed version and it will be the easiest one for people to discover and use if they are already using AWS. It doesn't require any of that special sauce fanciness. Most of their managed offerings are mediocre also-ran versions of things, but they are just easier to use within the existing ecosystem, so they win.
What I find absurd is the perspective that it is 1. a giant no no breach of the spirit of open source software to provide software with open source code but a license that restricts commercial resale, and 2. it's totally great for megacorporations to reap the vast majority of the rewards that accrue to popular mature open source software services.
I honestly can't fathom this worldview or how so many people here seem to be so sure it is the one that makes sense.
If you win this battle for mindshare, people will just stop making open source services like these. Every service will just be fully closed source SaaS. Amazon can't just re-sell that no matter what, and people just crap on you if you make it open source (edit: re-reading this, should have said "source available" here), so why would anyone bother?
Increasingly people who make open source software services are damned if they do and damned if they don't, and if that is how it's gonna be, people are going to just stop bothering with it.
