The real question that has to be answered, and this is the hard one, when does the product begin to be monetized? Let’s say it’s a full DB option as part of AW

The real question that has to be answered, and this is the hard one, when does the product begin to be monetized? Let’s say it’s a full DB option as part of AWS RDS (or whatever that graph DB equivalent is). That probably is clearly monetizing the product. But what if they completely abstract the API and not expose the original one, it’s just the backing engine for a graph DB product? Now moving away from a direct product, what if it’s just the backing DB AWS uses for managing all of their infrastructure? It’s not being directly monetized at that point but it might be the most critical component for the AWS operations, which means that it is helping them monetize other products. Do they owe in this case? (I’m speaking about the license here, not whether or not they should or should not based on goodness or feature improvements they want to pay to see). As the DB moves further away from profit centers in an organization, at what point is it no longer being monetized? Personally, I’d like to see a model where the OSS developers can and are paid in all of these cases for their work, but I’m not always sure there is anything better than a contract to support and build new features (classic OSS support model).