Earlier quoted context omitted.
There is no possible way to compete against someone else who doesn't need to fund the development of the software but can still take in all the revenues and profits from deploying it as a service.
Not true, you can compete with the quality of the deployed service _separate_ from the development of the software. The quality of the service can include internal, at-scale optimizations that don't affect user-facing parity with the open-source software. Open source companies with SaaS offerings need to have plans to differentiate themselves on hosting quality, not features. Yes, you can do better at hosting your ow…
That is true in a literal sense but (anecdotally) from the point of view of an engineer deploying ie; Redis, there is no real space for that angle of competition when the choice is between having to go through procurement hurdles to sign a contract with Redis Labs versus say; spinning up Redis on AWS which has zero hurdles because there is already an organization wide agreement in place for example.
The competition there isn't a level playing field as the deck is kind of stacked for most businesses where engineers don't have free reign to procurement what might be objectively the best hosting solution?
I've never really thought through this in any depth before now so don't consider this a great fleshed out argument, just an observation from my personal experience.