> the overt motive is to enhance monetization by preventing licensees from competing with them to sell services: it is to create a moat enabling monopolization and monopoly rents.
Here's the problem: Amazon, Microsoft, and Google are already able to charge something approaching monopoly rents because they have built a moat that others can't dream to cross. Heck, try to even build two services that talk to each other between the moats and you will get hit with massive data-egress charges. And they do this by monetizing free products with no compensation to the developer. If you are Redis, your hosted product, whose core you developed, is less competitive than that of the cloud providers who didn't contribute anything to the project. At the same time, the parent tech behemoths are engaged in all sorts of other bad behavior that only massive tech companies can get away with.
This state of affairs seriously threatens the open-source ecosystem and the source-available licenses are targeted to righting this imbalance. Again, are they perfect? No. If you are making money selling the software without modification, is it reasonable to ask for royalties to go to the developers? I think, on balance, that is reasonable.
If not source-available licensing, what is the better solution to the problem?