That's...not mostly open source. Being able to pay whomever to run a hosted version for you and not have that be exclusive to the original creators isn't, especially in the age when hosted services are in high demand, a peripheral feature of open source. It's integral to the value proposition.
If AWS/Google/Azure had to pay some fee to the original creators to provide a hosted version, they would definitely do it for a popular enough product.
Everyone would still get all the benefits, except AWS/Google/Azure get a little less money (down from some hundreds of millions) and the creators get a little more than $0.
I fail to see the negative effects on any entity there except what would amount to rounding error in AWS costs. Doesn't actually seem so integral to the value proposition of open source. Definitely seems "mostly open source".
For example, if ElasticSearch would have been closed source? People would go to Solr. If Solr closes? Postgres and a lot of swearing.
You have to remember that while AWS ElasticSearch was a bad thing for Elastic Co, it was absolutely great for all sorts of much smaller companies who did not have enough resources to run their own clusters, as Elastic's offering is 2x price of AWS one [0].
[0] https://medium.com/gigasearch/which-elasticsearch-provider-i...
1) there's a lot of software that's mostly-open-source-except-Amazon-isnt-allowed-to-run-a-hosted-version-of-it-without-paying-the-authors
2) all the software from 1) is completely proprietary
a lot more people benefit from 1 than 2. But somehow it seems that OSS purists prefer #2? It seems like they would rather less Open-Source Software in the world, all to maintain the purity of the meaning?