One of the biggest pain points in monetization of open source is that the large companies such as Amazon and Microsoft are in a better position to provide suppo

One of the biggest pain points in monetization of open source is that the large companies such as Amazon and Microsoft are in a better position to provide support and cloud hosting for open source projects than even the original developer. That is because because it is open source, the big company is able to see exactly how the internals of the service work. However, the internals of the cloud service are still opaque to open source cloud hosting company. Thus the cloud company is in a better position to optimize and debug the open source product. In addition, companies like having “one throat to choke”. It is a nightmare for business when different vendors all blame each other. If the service is hosted by the cloud company, there is one neck to choke since they own the entire experience. In addition, good software engineering practices reduce the moat of the original open source company. APIs and documentation and tests for an open source project should allow an experience software developer who is unfamiliar with the project to quickly come up to speed. Thus, the large company can rapidly acquire expertise in the open source tool if they want to. Paradoxically, these issues apply most to venture capital startups where there is an expectation of massive valuation and return on investment. A “lifestyle” business supporting open source software is very doable mainly because the returns, while large for the person, and not big enough to attract the large companies. An example of such a successful open source business is I think SQLite where, from Hwaci makes a decent amount of money supporting SQLite, but not enough to attract unwanted attention.