Some of what I said still stands but that's a big enough mistake on my part that I just need to apologize and back off.

I do think you make a decent case for open source being a viable way to make a profitable business. There are certainly businesses that achieve that, and I would love to see more of them.

I wasn't trying to give a blow-by-blow rebuttal to everything you wrote, so it's certainly fair to say I was cherrypicking.

I was just trying to explain some of why I think making a business's core product open source ticks the difficulty level up a notch. I believe AWS has made a practice of snagging OSS systems and making them effectively their own, thus undercutting the original developers' attempts at running a business. I may be mistaken about that, though.

As I said, though, you make a number of good points (most of which I already agree with). There are a number of ways to make it work, and I may well have overstated the difficulty of building businesses with GPL software.