[__d]

Does anyone run proprietary software in a cloud context?

The whole point is that the hardware becomes as flexible as the software, spin up, spin down, blow it away and deploy a fresh instance if something goes wrong.

I can't see many people trying to do that with proprietary licensing?

[closeparen]

Absolutely. You can even get the license and support contract costs built into the instance’s hourly rate. RHEL, Oracle DB, Windows Server, and SQL Server are all offered this way.