Is it? Do you really feel AWS' model is healthy for free software in the long term if business models around the creation and maintenance of open source projects disappear?
I would say Google's approach of partnering with maintainers instead of competing with them is healthier, though only just.
I don't know if open-source _businesses_ are healthy for open-source. It seems to fit much better with community volunteer projects without the pressure of trying to develop a business model around them: which feels like the root of the problem. Sponsoring developers with Patreon and donation runs has worked in the past and given us great projects.
I'm genuinely interested in examples of great projects from those funding sources.
When I think about OSS databases for example I can't think of any widely used ones that don't have at least one commercial entity that provides maintenance and support which funds development.
There's difference between a) having a big corporate backer for an open-source project vs b) a company and business built around that open-source project.
The incentives and existential threats towards the project are completely different.
There is evidence to the contrary that seems to be relevant here.
To wit, it's an "open-source business" providing the open source software people apparently feel very strongly about, not a "community volunteer project without the pressure".
The business model of having a monopoly on hosting Elastic was never compatible with open source in the first place.
Open source in a business context is built on the premise of several suppliers competing on the same product. I can't help but notice that the increased competition made the product severely less neutered, as Amazon did publish their Elastic distribution as open source just as the model prescribes, and this put pressure on Elastic to reduce some on the limitations from theirs. No Tivoization seemed to have taken place.
While partnering would have been much better for Elastic, I'm not sure Google would have done it better in this case.
I am not interested in models. I'm interested in actions.
You want some guarantee that AWS, Google, or Elastic will treat the OSS community right. That guarantee doesn't exist. People bought in to Elastic's "guarantee" on this front years ago, and that did not pay off. There's no such thing as a model that stands the test of time; there's only today. Does it solve your problems? Is it licensed in a way that preserves the freedom of its users and maintainers? Is there recourse if that changes?
I would say Google's approach of partnering with maintainers instead of competing with them is healthier, though only just.