But if they develop it and are the only ones developing it (because the rest are freeloaders by definition, since they make no improvement) then they would have the better knowledge of the product and could provide the better support, that should grant the more juicy clients.
Evaluating the quality of support at the purchasing stage could be downright impossible. If you see two products that look the same (and you haven't used them yet so can't see the difference, if any), and one is 30% cheaper, many would pick the cheaper version.
Let's assume, Hetzner or OVH themself would just take Ubicloud and offer this as a service without paying any money to Ubicloud. In this case, many customers would just use the Hetzner/OVH offer (everything from the same vendor = more convenient) and Ubicloud has no way to make money. The AGPL license would not prevent IaaS providers from doing so. I think it's not easy to build a stable business as a company if everything is OpenSource. If Ubicloud would be a pure community project, that would be a different story.
That would work for 3 months, then they would start running into edge cases and issues that need fixing, patching or developing a new feature. So either providers start bringing in knowledge in terms of developers, or sign some kind of contract with Ubicloud to get those developments as needed.
Do most commercial PostgreSQL / MySQL / Redis / whatever hosting providers employ developers to work on these projects? No, they get a few sysadmins that know enough to keep it running and watch the money roll in. At best they might "sponsor" the project so they get slightly higher priority on their bug reports, but even that is just a handful of the big players. Most just apt-get install the official distribution and plug it into a billing system. And if your main source of development are developers paid by a SaaS company, this will kill you. This exact thing is, after all, why the Elastic license exists.
