[strangemonad]

Honestly, even putting aside the social and community aspects. When I’m evaluating a technical offering I’m often very willing to pay for “hosted xyz”. I feel like I’m reading through the tea leaves to understand which AWS product offering is more or less a hosted offering of an open source product and what additions AWS has made that might change performance characteristics. Even without upstreaming changes, if the offering were pitched as “hosted X with these additions unique to aws” I would likely choose the hosted option over operating it myself.

It goes without saying though that supporting the open source core (and the core developers) would also go a long way.