I was wondering this too. Though it used to be you could monetize programming languages more readily. I wonder as databases approach a commoditization point if the DB market becomes more like the programming language market.
Right now turnkey hosting is the main way of making money. But if open source push button distributed database in an arbitrary cloud happened (via easier containerized orchestration than currently exists) we wouldn’t really have much of a hosted database market. Then database open source might start to look more like programming languages and less like money making entities unto themselves. Honestly this is probably the bigger threat to the Mongos, Confluents etc than anything else. And why AWS pushed proprietary tech like lambda.
Distributed databases will always require some kind of specialist knowledge to maintain. The physical deployment of code is actually the easiest part, the big problem is how to keep things running and fix issues once things invariably start breaking.
The value proposition for hosted services is "we'll take care of everything, you don't have to worry about operations" while the value proposition for the development companies is "we'll help you run things and we'll reinvest the proceeds in maintaining the platform."
The incentive for AWS is to extract maximum profit from open source projects (with no real regards for sustainability), while the incentive for the development companies are more aligned with having a sustainable long term community and product.
Right now turnkey hosting is the main way of making money. But if open source push button distributed database in an arbitrary cloud happened (via easier containerized orchestration than currently exists) we wouldn’t really have much of a hosted database market. Then database open source might start to look more like programming languages and less like money making entities unto themselves. Honestly this is probably the bigger threat to the Mongos, Confluents etc than anything else. And why AWS pushed proprietary tech like lambda.