It's too dangerous to build a company around open source. You're trapped between AWS eating you or having to relicense and AWS eating you. Source-available from

It's too dangerous to build a company around open source. You're trapped between AWS eating you or having to relicense and AWS eating you. Source-available from the beginning protects you from this. The problem with OSS stuff is that people are generally price-sensitive and you can't beat the platforms for this since they get the R&D for free. It's sort of how I don't hire junior people. When others have trained them up, I can just hire them for more. The other guys have to pay to train them so they hope to get some reward for that, but switching costs are low. I can just take pre-trained guys. And just like the pre-trained guys in this scenario, AWS can always offer a better deal. You need to moat your stuff in some way. Elastic License is ideal if you want to build a company around this. If you just want to make things for the good of mankind or whatever, you can use BSD/GPL/MIT/whatever, but you're doomed if you want to build a company around those licenses. Elastic made it by being quick to the jump. Others have followed. The only really successful model that's different has got to be Kong and RHEL and they've both been around a while. Kong's adoption is troubled because once you get successful, using their OSS thing is better than the enterprise because their pricing tiers go up. But they seem to have good enterprise sales team. Don't know about RHEL. But if I were starting a company around this stuff, I'd be very careful about having core tech be true OSS. Source-available yeah, but true OSS is too risky.