Open Source Doesn’t Make Money Because It Isn’t Designed to Make Money
Its commoditized the cost to use software to near zero which has created a lot of unprecedented value and products that wouldn&#x27;t be possible before OSS.<p>Unfortunately most of the wealth created by OSS is being reaped by the large cloud vendors because relatively no-one pays for OSS but they do to host their production systems on it, atm this revenue goes directly to the major tech cloud companies which are using it to build out their multi-billion dollar infrastructure moats, ensuring a barrier to entry no other will be able to partake in.<p>This is why cloud vendors have become so &quot;OSS friendly&quot; - they love the status quo as they&#x27;ve become the primary beneficiaries from everyone developing and distributing OSS for free as long as they&#x27;re able to collect the rent when it gets hosted in the end.<p>You&#x27;re starting to see the conflicts as more companies like Redis Labs, Elastic, Confluent and MongoDB who realize this and start distributing their future investments under &quot;OSS free that&#x27;s free for everyone else but can&#x27;t be used commercially by cloud vendors&quot; as a way to force licensing so Cloud vendors are unable to use their own investments to compete against them - and force some revenue share back from when Customers pay for OSS, when they host it.<p>So when you hear how much cloud companies &quot;love OSS&quot; and how their initiatives like &quot;Open Distro for Elasticsearch&quot; is to ensure it stays open, know that they&#x27;re not doing it out of altruism, it&#x27;s to repackage Elastic&#x27;s OSS investments and make it available for free so they can be hosted on AWS without having to host with Elastic, it effectively lets them avoid licensing and revenue sharing back to the companies who&#x27;ve invested their time and resources into developing it.