> If the the only value of your hosted offering is the hosting I would expect you to get eaten by a company with cheaper hosting costs than you

By this logic Google and Amazon should just own-all-the-things because they have the cheapest hosting costs?

> I'm talking specifically about a clean-room reimplementation of proprietary add-ons that typically make up the "enterprise" version of lots of software.

I don't know what you mean here. As far as I know this is not what is being discussed. Amazon has done no "clean-room reimplementation" here.

That's not what I'm saying at all. I'm saying that if you write a piece of OSS software and your plan to monetize it is just hosting it then you're going to get eaten by companies who are better at hosting than you. Your valuable asset and your core business is your software not your ops.

Next, if the way you plan to monetize your OSS software is by selling a proprietary "enterprise" version but the features that version includes are easy to clone and your licensing costs are high then large companies will just hire people to develop their own in-house version and they might kill your business by open sourcing their version because they don't need to sell their in-house version to make it worth the cost.

Maybe they're referring to DocumentDB versus Mongodb? My understanding was documentdb was wire compatible but a clean room reimplementation of it?