With the rise of cloud computing, the effort by cloud providers to commoditize their complements, i.e., software, inevitably leads to this particular kind of conflict between companies backing OSS software who wish to deploy their own SaaS offerings and cloud providers with their own SaaS offerings. A common response is that OSS backers can build businesses based on support and consulting but I believe that's overly restrictive. Those kinds of businesses don't scale nearly as well as managed services and it will definitely have a chilling effect on OSS development if the kinds of companies that are permitted to be built on them are simply support and consulting. I don't believe that companies backing OSS have an exclusive right to offer managed services for their software, but the current situation with cloud providers offering managed services with only token engagement with the OSS community (and then only when forced into it by licensing restrictions) is not beneficial to OSS, either.
The post describes how Amazon offered more than a token engagement. Elastic rejected them, as such a partnership would have included "preferential treatment that would place them above our users". That's consistent with what I've seen from other OSS-backing companies; they want cloud providers to contribute to their community, but flatly refuse to go out of their way to enable it.
