Heck AWS is the sole reason all these projects needed to go through these license changes to prevent AWS from completely destroying their business models.
Weirdly I’d put Microsoft above modern-Google, and that’s still a low bar.
You might think that's got a very low ceiling. But, even though it's a bad example in many ways, OpenAI showed that the ceiling is very high. And if you're morally flexible even higher.
When a bigger entity (e.g. AWS) decides to undercut the original creator/vendor (e.g. redis,elastic search), MIT code des not help.
I know some lawyers who specialize in these choices. Everyone thinks their choice doesn't smell, but there are the resources to make informed choices.
There the question turns to "you may sue me, if it breaks" as reasoning. In reality sueing will rarely work, but having a business contract satisfies the company's board and insurance about using the software over an "AS IS"-license alone.
I don't know how you came to OpenAI as an example given that they famously succeeded while going closed-source with the release of ChatGPT.
You really underestimate the value of support contracts.
I can't speak to how successful it is, but Daniel/Curl have been running with this model[0][1] for years. Probably not too different from 'drh and SQLite[2][3].
[0] https://curl.se/support.html
[1] https://rock-solid.curl.dev/