[rpdillon]

I don't understand this argument. It's weird enough to me when folks say "steal" in the context of copyright, but in the context of FLOSS software, it seems wholly inappropriate. Third-party hosting of open source is the norm, not the exception, in my experience.

The antitrust argument seems orthogonal: lots of small companies make money hosting FLOSS software (Bitnami[0] comes to mind, but so do other hosting companies like Dreamhost). I just searched "elasticsearch hosting" on DDG[1], and Elastic is the 5th result, behind four companies I've never heard of. In many ways, that's exactly what makes FLOSS so attractive to me: if one provider isn't suitable, I can switch. I was very grateful for this in 2013 when I had a huge issue with a change in how LShift was hosting RabbitMQ, and I was able to move my company's cluster over to CloudAMQP instead. I had a similar issue with Elastic in 2016: they didn't offer compute-heavy nodes, but our application was compute heavy (geohashing-intensive for the majority of queries). I discussed with the Elastic sales team, and they said they had no timeline for this, so we migrated the company to AWS ElasticSearch.

So I guess I'm not sure how things are improved if Amazon is broken up...even if AWS had to stand on its own, this seems like it would remain a proven business strategy that customers value and is used across the industry.

[0]: https://bitnami.com/stack/elasticsearch [1]: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=elasticsearch+hosting