Not only has the cloud vendor already gone through the hoops of getting an enterprise agreement in place. They're also big, and recognised, and know how to deal with Procurement. And Risk. And Compliance. And Legal.
Not saying I like that situation. It does seem unjust that the big guys can just cherry-pick good products and monetise them without giving anything back. It offends my sense of fairness. But that's commercial reality, at least in today's markets.
A real personal example I experienced: at one time, the founding team behind a project I happened to use at work actually told me they didn't want to do the enhancement I was asking for because my particular scale-out needs were too niche and none of their other paying customers need that and they didn't have the engineering bandwidth to build my feature (the opportunity cost for them was too high to abandon building features needed by their other customers).
So I had to solve this scale-out problem by myself - which was painful (we had high opportunity cost too).
In that situation, if my cloud vendor were to say they would solve that problem for me as they would be willing to invest whatever engineering bandwidth required to make it happen, then I would go with them.
Now if that happens a few times, the cloud vendor's service offering will be much superior to the original project founding team's offering.
Over time, the cloud vendor's offering will also be cheaper.
Of course the trick here is to be watchful of being sucked into a lock-in by the cloud vendor. You will have to insist that all of the features they are doing for you are actually open-source and portable to another cloud. Many companies define such requirements as part of their procurement process and audit for it.
As more companies start to push for such guardrail requirements to prevent cloud lock-in, the open-source commercial support model may still have a chance – but unfortunately that doesn't necessarily mean the project founding company will do well.
Aren't cloud vendors generally less willing then smaller SAAS companies to do custom engineering work for their customers?
If we want to encourage free markets, the GDPR et al. need to be very careful to disincentivize "traffic within different parts of the same entity."
As is, if my regulatory compliance is satisfied through AWS's data and IAM handling, then if an Amazon-hosted service better integrates with those components, it strictly dominates competition.
That's a pretty unregulatable quality, and one easily optimized by Amazon (for itself), and impossibly by everyone else (on Amazon).
This weaponizes data protection regulation into a moat around large everything-and-the-kitchen-sink I/PaaS providers.
There needs to be balance between (a) protecting data & (b) ensuring a competitive ecosystem with multiple viable solutions.
> The only aspect of this which is "detrimental to society" arguably is the legal requirements
When it's hard to make a living out of open source software, that's detrimental.
Elastic is a feature, event bus is a feature, database is a feature, compute is a feature.
I don't know if it out-competes them on those terms exactly, rather than the advantage of "Well I'm already on AWS and they offer an ES service so why not just use that".