"[...] I'll Google CodeSquish and discover it does everything I need, costs nothing, and is 100x more performant—even though it's maintained by a single recluse who only emerges from their Vermont farm to push code to their self-hosted git repo."
The poor, single recluse discovers one Tuesday afternoon that your company makes 100 million dollars a year with "CodeSquish", while not contributing anything back. He silently questions his life choices—or, shall we say, licensing choices—while feeding chickens on his Vermont farm.
Most of OSS or even SaaS stuff is useful in F500 company but not more like convenience and not being able to put value on it. This also you can see in article even SaaS vendors have to make shit up to seem more valuable for big companies and use value based pricing by calling people and trying to push BS on them.
I also don’t see companies running much OSS systems as reselling them because then usually they rather build their crappy one like article mentions because they want to own whole IP.
Amazon pulling it of on Elastic was mostly because Elastic built a brand - they are not pulling this off on a random project. They might use some project to run their infra but attribution of value to a specific lib or project is super hard. Then also Amazon is making money because it is Amazon not because they use Linux kernel. It is hard to wrap head around anyway ;)
Thinking about it, maybe he should start sending invoices to the larger companies. If they're reasonably small and for a product the company does use, finance will just pay them without questioning a thing.
"[...] I'll Google CodeSquish and discover it does everything I need, costs nothing, and is 100x more performant—even though it's maintained by a single recluse who only emerges from their Vermont farm to push code to their self-hosted git repo."
The poor, single recluse discovers one Tuesday afternoon that your company makes 100 million dollars a year with "CodeSquish", while not contributing anything back. He silently questions his life choices—or, shall we say, licensing choices—while feeding chickens on his Vermont farm.