[mindcrime]

In general, that's of course obviously true. For software like this, that's geared toward use by businesses and SaaS applications, I agree with Cockroach Labs. Their hosted solution doesn't stand a chance if AWS decides to do a hosted version of CockroachDB, and they won't see a penny of that revenue.

I understand why this is the default assumption that people tend to make, but I'm not sure this analysis goes deep enough. I believe things are more nuanced than "you can't compete with Amazon". There are always a lot of different axes on which you can segment a market, and different attributes on which one can compete. And ironically, the fact that AWS (and other public cloud providers) exist simultaneously makes it easier to run your own cloud based service. And yes, it's possible to have something hosted on AWS while Amazon compete with you at the same time - see Netflix for the obvious example.

Note that I'm not saying it's easy to do any of this, and maybe a thorough enough analysis would reveal that, for CockroachDB it really is the case that "we can't compete in a market where AWS is playing". But I wouldn't necessarily take that as a given without having done a lot more research.