Is there a way to encourage AWS/GCP to contract major project maintainers for support? For example, could GCP set up a platform where maintainers of Postgres, Redis, ..., could sign up to be paid monthly, and perhaps to prioritize GCP issues when doing maintenance?
This would have the benefit of allowing GCP to continue offering all the open source databases, which is great for gaining customers who already use these popular tools.
For the scale of the required exit, they would need a very large support contract, and at that point it would be easier for Google / Amazon to just build their own solution, hire their own people to provide support and development, or just let market forces do their thing.
The fundamental shift now is that a lot of open source software is on shaky ground, having been built by VC money searching a profit. This is the same force plaguing NPM and the JS community. The piper must be paid at any cost, even if it means compromising the open source part of the project
I agree with that and it is one of the main reasons why I personally don't care for Open Source and make a huge distinction between it and Free Software.
Free software has the exact same problem here. You can be 100% free software and still have VC funding you. For the context of this discussion, they're the same.
There is essentially no difference between Open Source and Free Software, though people who prefer one label over the other tend to have different ideologies. In practice essentially everything that is recognized as Free Software by the FSF and the broader Free Software community is likewise recognized as Open Source by OSI and the broader Open Source community, and vice versa.
The difference is the focus, the one is focused on developers (and businesses) the other one on users. Which to me makes a huge difference to where the licenses used evolve, like we see in this article.
This would have the benefit of allowing GCP to continue offering all the open source databases, which is great for gaining customers who already use these popular tools.