>>This, in my mind, effectively discourages doing so as, if all you do is change the branding, people will eventually know and, depending on their ethics and the provided offering, they might choose not to use the “official” service.
There are a lot of factors that go into a SaaS decision. Price obviously, but also things like name-recognition etc.
In a business environment I'm more likely to use ElasticSearch from AWS because we already pay them every month (so I don't need a million people to sign off on it.) Plus I'm comfortable that they will be around next year, and they have the resources to fix hardware issues.
AWS running ElasticSearch is completely within the license (OK, until recently) and thus ethically I'm free to use it. It's being used -exactly- as elasticSearch released it to be used.
They obviously thought your argument was true, that people would prefer their hosting, but apparently they were wrong.
I get the desire to advertise a product as "free software" or "open source". But don't then complain when users make use of those freedoms. Be sure to pick a license that conforms to your actual goals. If you have conflicting goals then you need to resolve that first.
I love open source as much as the next guy, but its not a marketing term, it's a licensing term. Be sure you choose it for the right reasons.
