Quote from a blog post I wrote recently:

The key to making money with FOSS is to make software a commoditized complement of other, more profitable services. Examples of such services include selling support, customization, consulting, training, managed hosting, hardware, and certifications. Plenty of companies use this approach instead of building proprietary software: Red Hat, Collabora, System76, Purism, Canonical, SUSE, Hashicorp, Databricks, and Gradle are some names that come to mind.

Managed hosting isn’t a basket worth all your eggs if giants like AWS can do the same at a lower price. Being the developer can give an edge in areas like customization, support, and training; it doesn’t offer as obvious an advantage when it comes to hosting.

Elastic put all its eggs into the managed-hosting basket. Being the developer of Elastic didn’t give them enough of a competitive edge over AWS when it came to managed hosting, which came back to bite them.

Customization, support, and consulting are more sustainable revenue streams.

It's common for orgs to think "developer time is more important than cpu time".

Then they get a bunch of users and realize that they have to scale. With technical debt in the form of potentially millions of lines of Python, they have two option:

1. Re-write everything in something else
2. Swap out the interpreter and just re-write some parts that use libs iwth C-extensions.

Sometimes, the latter is the cheaper option.

Of course, the whole mess could have been avoided if they thought in the long-term a bit more.