Hey I'm Michael, the author of the article, and I did consider this but didn't go into detail for fear of bloating the read. I think there's two points here.
1. Not all software has viable OSS alternatives. The most obvious is consumer software, where some self-hosted solution is simply nonviable, but even something like Snowflake provides a ton of value by offering turnkey petabyte-scalable datawarehouses which are operationally complex enough I struggle to find an alternative to it (that said many smaller snowflake users probably can do just fine with a cheaper alternative like Clickhouse).
Where I think the switching will mostly happen is where SaaS lock-in has been exploited far too much to create exploitive pricing power (looker is the best example of this to me, it's really just an admittedly very good visualization tool but extremely overmonetized), if there are low-friction self-hosted OSS alternatives, people should swap out of those low-value, high-cost products and recycle the cash to prevent layoffs or better grow their own products.
2. At Plural we are working on improving OSS monetization mainly for self-hosted OSS which is actually very valuable in theory (fortune 500s often prefer it for security reasons), but usually poorly monetized. This is still early-stage obviously but will ultimately be us allowing oss developers to monetize for either support or open core features, and us handling the licensing and billing in a centralized, low-friction way.
This could theoretically claw back some of the cost savings, but if the overcharging is more due to excess pricing power from the realities of "cloud" infrastructure and the lock-in it creates, there should be at least a large delta remaining for users by eliminating that.
1. Not all software has viable OSS alternatives. The most obvious is consumer software, where some self-hosted solution is simply nonviable, but even something like Snowflake provides a ton of value by offering turnkey petabyte-scalable datawarehouses which are operationally complex enough I struggle to find an alternative to it (that said many smaller snowflake users probably can do just fine with a cheaper alternative like Clickhouse).
Where I think the switching will mostly happen is where SaaS lock-in has been exploited far too much to create exploitive pricing power (looker is the best example of this to me, it's really just an admittedly very good visualization tool but extremely overmonetized), if there are low-friction self-hosted OSS alternatives, people should swap out of those low-value, high-cost products and recycle the cash to prevent layoffs or better grow their own products.
2. At Plural we are working on improving OSS monetization mainly for self-hosted OSS which is actually very valuable in theory (fortune 500s often prefer it for security reasons), but usually poorly monetized. This is still early-stage obviously but will ultimately be us allowing oss developers to monetize for either support or open core features, and us handling the licensing and billing in a centralized, low-friction way.
This could theoretically claw back some of the cost savings, but if the overcharging is more due to excess pricing power from the realities of "cloud" infrastructure and the lock-in it creates, there should be at least a large delta remaining for users by eliminating that.