Cloud providers were only possible because they can host OSS without licensing restriction or costs, they've worked out that they could charge for computing by

Cloud providers were only possible because they can host OSS without licensing restriction or costs, they've worked out that they could charge for computing by providing hosting and is where they've put their billion dollar Cap-Ex into building impenetrable moats. Hosting OSS isn't the only thing that creates value, but it's where most of the revenue is now being derived since no-one pays for OSS, only to host it. The generated wealth is then be used to finance other proprietary and OSS efforts that can outspend and out resource anyone else they choose to compete with, who need to rely on a different source and business model for their sustainable income. Cloud hosting is the primary business model that allows investing in developing OSS as they'll still get paid in the end, in this way OSS bringing the cost of software down to zero becomes a loss-leading marketing expense (and competitive advantage) that allows mass free bait distribution of their software which everyone else is at a disadvantage to compete against. Essentially OSS is strengthening cloud monopolies by bringing the cost of software development to zero with the majority of wealth created going to making major tech cloud providers more wealthy and powerful each passing year. > Why should an end-user have to purchase ElasticSearch hosting from Elastic? Because AWS didn't put any of the investment in creating it, they're reaping the benefits from Elastic's investments and can undercut them since they don't have to fund any of the development and have access to an bigger economy of scale no-one else has access to.