> This is genuine, noob question: how is this different from AWS?

AWS owns the hardware, and doesn't write a lot of the software.

AWS actually is kind of the opposite - it often takes open source software (e.g. Apache, Mongo, Kubernetes) and then makes money off it by hosting it itself (with some enhancements etc).

If they do develop their own software (e.g. with S3) they don't give away the source code so others can deploy it, as that's part of their secret sauce.

In this scenario, where they would be offering the open source model and then offering the same model hosted, there isn't really a moat here - they would be leasing the hardware from a company like AWS, and adding a margin, but it woudl be trivial for another company (or Amazon) to take their same model and offer it for the same price or less.