You can rant about an "attack on freedom" all you want, but how do you propose that Confluent protect its business so that they can continue paying their engineers to keep working on tools for which they publish all the source code?

The alternatives seem to be 1. they keep all their stuff proprietary or 2. they leave it truly open and AWS takes the majority of their market and they slowly suffocate.

Aren't both of those strictly worse than the path they've taken?