I'm pretty sure ElastiCache has been around longer than Redis Labs too, so it's not like AWS undercut them, plus RL got a ton of free market research from it
In this case that’s true and why I said I don’t think it applies here. Typically it does though.
Open source services are in a weird spot. They spend tonnes of money developing it and big providers are able to cannibalise as soon as something becomes popular at very little cost to themselves.
I think we do need something between fully free and fully closed where cloud providers pay some kind of licensing. It’s a problem worth solving.