Comment by VWWHFSfQ
4 years ago
I think that's missing the forest for the trees. The license is designed to prevent hosting providers from selling the software as a service to their customers. The requirement to open source their entire infrastructure and operations is just a means to do that.
Technically it doesn't just prevent from selling SaaS. It prevents from selling SaaS without having the consent of the open source project first, which means negotiating a deal.
The value in AWS is not the software. (What I heard about it a few years ago it's very explicitly not the cobbled together software.) It's the whole enterprise, the structure, the teams, the operations staff.