The Challenges of Open Source in the Cloud Only Era

More companies are using restrictive licensing to prevent cloud vendors from taking the open source project and running on their clouds. While licensing does help with timing strategy, i don't think it's enough to build a moat against big cloud. These licenses will not stop an amazon for example, in building a compatible service like document d b is to mongo,. or even potentially forking a project like they did to elastic. Start ups using open source strategies during the cloud transition era provided critical products and services which allowed them to compete with the big three. The same tactics may not necessarily have the same impact in the cloud only era.