This issue here is with new "Open Source" software companies earning revenue through hosting as opposed to simply providing support / custom feature development / etc.

It creates a conflict of interest when others want to host it, since it takes their revenue away. However, in my opinion anyone should be able to compete on hosting/support.

This revenue goes back into funding development, but places restrictions on how the software can be used - making it "Open Sourced, Closed Service Based Hosting" or something like that. Inotherwords, we need a new name for this type of software.

My question is - if AWS simply made it easy to spin up an elastic search cluster, but didn't offer a specific API/Service - whats the difference here? Very little.