Has anyone ever considered the licensing implications of this? How is amazon able to convert an open source product into a proprietary one and then charge for access to it?
Of course you can argue they’re charging for the infrastructure management, not the software itself. But that argument quickly breaks down as Amazon introduces new software, under new names, with a proprietary management interface over an open source core. Try to find the source code; you can’t.
And if you accept the premise that they’re just charging for hosting, then it leads to the question of why an open source project doesn’t reap any benefits from that hosting, or at the very least, from the management interface on top of it.
It seems like a better solution would be something akin to AWS marketplace, where open source projects are available to be hosted, and the maintainers can see some revenue from them.
It seems like unfair rent seeking behavior that amazon is able to slap a management interface on open source software and then charge for it under the guise of “hosting.”