My own perspective is that companies should probably stop saying that "if only Amazon would contribute back the occasional patch, everything would be fine."

If much of the future is cloud, then getting the hyper-scalars to contribute occasional patches doesn't solve the problem of competition.

That's reflected in our post:

    Some may ask, “Why create a new license - why not just compete
    with public clouds by just providing the best product experience
    on a level playing field?”

    The problem is that the playing field is far from level.
    Today, the public cloud vendors (Amazon, Microsoft, Google)
    are trillion dollar corporations – the largest companies in
    the world – and have a myriad of advantages that arise from
    that size, including market position, pricing power, deep
    balance sheets, and (what many have even called) unfair
    business practices. They lock large customers into prepaid, 
    discounted, multi-year enterprise-wide agreements, and give
    startups $100,000s of free credits.

Now, non-profits like the Linux Foundation are not trying to solve for this same problem.

But I think that the tech and innovation ecosystem would be much for the worst if everybody else is hamstrung when competing in the cloud, or else just have to go fully closed source and proprietary.

Can you honestly say this license is trying to solve for the same problem, rather than just carving a niche for your own business at the expense of other businesses, e.g. other startups who might be able to offer a better service contract to the public cloud vendors? Because it's hard for me to imagine it differently the way these are worded.

This is my main problem with this type of licenses, none of them really seem to have any interest in actually getting the public cloud vendors to compete or buy services or contribute (financially or otherwise) to the upstream project. It just perpetuates the problem because now your company is the one doing it by telling customers they have to sign your agreement and can never buy from any other vendor. I'm sorry if this is an overly negative assessment but I just can't see it as much more than passing the buck when there is no attempt at reciprocity, through copyleft or through some other means. (As much as I had criticism of the SSPL, at least it tried to have this)

It looks like public cloud providers (really mostly AWS) will never ever contribute enough to upstream to support full-time upstream development teams and no one has enough leverage to change that situation. Given that reality, the only solution is what Timescale has come up with.

I know, I get that, but long-term this seems like non-solution that won't actually do anything. It just ties it to their service offering instead of Amazon's. If they decide to sell out to Amazon eventually they'll probably be able to bid the price higher. That's good for them, and if their customers are fine with it, then that's good for them too, but let's not pretend it's something more. I know in current times I certainly wouldn't trust a database with performance/uptime guarantees, where the authors are hiding the implementation from public scrutiny.

If you're going to tell me your company is actually worth a trillion quid and can really compete with AWS then I would see your point, but otherwise I can't see a way that this is going to make the market better for anyone besides the other small fraction of companies that have come up with similar ideas of banning Amazon. (Full disclosure: I'm in the same boat and I personally refuse to purchase any products or services from Amazon, but I acknowledge I'm in the severe minority)

    where the authors are hiding the implementation 
    from public scrutiny

We agree that such visibility is a good thing! All of our source code (both Apache-2 and TSL) has always been public on github:

https://github.com/timescale/timescaledb

Sorry I should have been more clear. It appears you still do that because it's the bare minimum you need to do to keep customers from leaving for Amazon. But if that's where you stop then I can't see how it's solving the problem.

Amazon contributing their changes (if they even do any) but taking the majority of hosting income doesn't fix the business model for the company making the software.

Linux has an entirely different scenario for the economics around it, so from the "does this work financially" perspective the comparison isn't all that helpful.