Perhaps we need a different way to fund database development (not necessarily a single company monetizing it).
If the service you provide is hosting DBs, you are are at an inherent disadvantage competing with hosted db offerings form your potential customers' cloud provider. Even if your product is technically superior in every way, you are another entity they have to do business with (billing, support, contracts, security evaluations, etc.), which adds friction, and either you host on your own infrastructure, which means higher network latency, and network costs to get data to and from your customer's cloud, or you have hosting options that run inside all the major cloud providers, in any regions your customers use, which means you (or your customer) ends up paying the hyperscaler for the infrastructure, and you have the added complexity of having to know how to manage it on multiple cloud platforms. And there there is also the fact that it is much more difficult for you to build integration with the cloud's IAM or other services.
Basically, most cloud customers would rather use a service that is part of the cloud platform than from another provider. Ideally, instead of competing with the hyperscalers, they would sell some service to the hyperscalers that have the ir own hosted services. But I don't know how to get there.
As a brief sidenote, AFAICT this isn't what happened with the hashicorp license change, for them it seems like the pressure largely came from startups, not the big cloud companies.
> Perhaps we need a different way to fund database development (not necessarily a single company monetizing it).
We have several in use by long-running open source database projects that have not felt a need to jump on proprietary source-available licensing, even though firms like AWS are indeed using their code and selling services.
AWS (and other big firms with hosted services) are also sponsoring those DBs with code and/or money, but in many cases the basic model predates the big push to the cloud, and other downstream businesses were doing that before AWS and other cloud hosts.
What you're sort of proposing is cloud SaaSaaS. AWS would build out hooks for providers to manage the DBs they sell so they look like part of AWS. The main problem is AWS already has most of the services most of their customers want, so there isn't a big market opportunity.
If the service you provide is hosting DBs, you are are at an inherent disadvantage competing with hosted db offerings form your potential customers' cloud provider. Even if your product is technically superior in every way, you are another entity they have to do business with (billing, support, contracts, security evaluations, etc.), which adds friction, and either you host on your own infrastructure, which means higher network latency, and network costs to get data to and from your customer's cloud, or you have hosting options that run inside all the major cloud providers, in any regions your customers use, which means you (or your customer) ends up paying the hyperscaler for the infrastructure, and you have the added complexity of having to know how to manage it on multiple cloud platforms. And there there is also the fact that it is much more difficult for you to build integration with the cloud's IAM or other services.
Basically, most cloud customers would rather use a service that is part of the cloud platform than from another provider. Ideally, instead of competing with the hyperscalers, they would sell some service to the hyperscalers that have the ir own hosted services. But I don't know how to get there.
As a brief sidenote, AFAICT this isn't what happened with the hashicorp license change, for them it seems like the pressure largely came from startups, not the big cloud companies.