Amazon actually seems to have seen this coming. While Amazon Linux 1&2 was a basterdized CentOS6& derivative (with some newer packages), the latest breed (Amazon Linux 2022/2023) is based off Fedora.

Also, I'm not convinced Amazon (or Oracle for that matter) have a very bright future. The opaque development process and (lack of) community support make development pretty hard. I know from experience, getting bugs resolved (or just getting Amazon to care) is very hard. At the same time, even for a large corporate maintaining your own distro brings with it considerable costs.

Wouldn't it be great if instead they would work together, share some of the costs and profits of support and cloud mutually?!

Amazon missed then, the company to bet on is SuSE here.

Both Oracle and Amazon Linux have VERY bright futures for their use-cases.

Do you run Oracle? Want to know your distro will be supported 100%. Oracle Linux seems like a damn good bet to use.

Are you one of the largest companies on earth, who needs a distro to run your business? If so... guess what.. your distro is viable just on your own business.

Amazon offering Amazon Linux is just them showing some internal tech. Nothing more.

Amazon (and Microsoft) offering a Linux distribution is about (a) raining in the explosion of distros their various teams depend on that they don't themselves control, and (b) answering insistent cloud customers requests for "What distro do you recommend? Do you support {distro}? Do you auto patch {distro}? How come update to {distro} broke your service/product? Do you not work with {distro}?

Last year many services on Azure went down because they all used Ubuntu and Ubuntu pushed an update that broke for a DNS configuration that Microsoft uses. Having your own distro won't guard you from fuck-ups of course, but you can imagine the difficult conversation Microsoft had to have with their biggest customers about how Canonical can take down your 40 billion dollar business globally?