The wailing of VC-backed "open source" companies about AWS, followed by their demonstrating their commitment to open source by ... closing their source. It's all such a sideshow.
The "main event", to me, is to what extent AWS (and Azure and Google), who make serious bank by spinning open source, engage with the challenge of keeping the software they spin alive.
When the companies that are making billions off open source are contributing less than the companies making millions, or (gulp) the contractors and small businesses making thousands... that's not a legal problem or a licensing problem.
But it's a structural problem that can really only be solved by the big companies stepping up and saying, "we recognize we have a unique role to fill here, as the ones extracting the most value from this ecosystem". We cannot MAKE them do it. They have to WANT to do it.
An open question is how we create incentive structures larger that these huge companies. Some of it might be culture? The same IT culture that doesn't want to spin production software without a "support contract" could refuse to buy services from clouds that don't employ experts.
Buying production services from organizations that lack code-level expertise in the underlying software seems risky, but it's a risk that right now a lot of IT shops are... if not "willing to take", are at least "willing to ignore".
@pwramsey IMHO fundamentally its about ethics. The metric should be the % of revenue which goes towards the project. And I bet smaller companies actually contribute more. I also personally think more small companies contributing to a common goal is worth way more than any single company.
Yet, this is often the total opposite of what actually succeeds. As such I think the best thing any support of O/S cab do is garner support for grass roots O/S entities.
