I apologize. I confused Ampere with Amazon's Graviton.
In terms of firmware openness, yeah, you don't get the firmware source, but you don't get to touch the machines physically either so you wouldn't have a chance to run a custom build anyway :D
(While Ampere Altras are supported by upstream EDK2, have fun)
What does being able to buy them have to do with.. anything?
The concept of renting a VM is not new. The introduction of processors that a VM hosting company designs exclusively for use on that service is, and the comments in the thread above seem to imply a fear of this causing some kind of lock-in or whatever. What I'm saying is, this is completely unfounded fear. Graviton instances are very much standard machines and you can run the exact same OS images on there as you can on an Altra or a HoneyComb LX2K or a MACCHIATObin. (Yeah, the OS needs a driver for Amazon's network card, but mainline Linux, FreeBSD and NetBSD have that.)
Oh, we should be so grateful...
Or perhaps be happy with what we got and not sacrifice everything for some very short term 5% benefits?
Take one guess.
Nothing becomes any more closed if you switch the ISA of the CPU used in your VPS to aarch64. The only closed ecosystem here is AWS itself, but what takes power away from you is using non-EC2 services like DynamoDB.
In fact the Arm ecosystem is way more open, because there are SoCs that can run completely blob-free firmware (e.g. from Marvell), which is just not happening with any modern Intel/AMD system.
A firmware-blob is nothing in comparison for the vast majority of cases.