Maybe you missed my last sentence. I've been hacking on and off for a couple years on a side project I'd like to monetize, to capture some of
my value add, while also giving back. (It's sorta "if you build it they will come" at this point tbh so I don't necessarily expect it to work). My project is sort of "OSS platform as a service" only I just deploy it for you and teach you to run it yourself, while jumping on a call occasionally if you need SRE for it, and continuing to iterate on tooling as well as make PRs to the tools as it makes sense. Vault and consul (as a vault backend only) are components I've used for that (via cert-manager so they're replaceable tbh) and I'm no longer sure if that's viable.
And generally as a contributor to the vault codebase, however small, I'm not thrilled they want to capture more value from it themselves while not offering me a miniscule chunk of that.
The whole cloud provider argument really feels a lot like Displaced Aggression. You're probably punishing the people smaller than you a lot more than you are the billion dollar cloud providers who can afford both expensive lawyers and can very easily afford to fork your codebases as we see with OpenSearch vs ElasticSearch.
