Customers fear vendor lock-in, so an open platform/ecosystem for git could flourish, like java. Hopefully they'll have a better business model for it than Sun did. Maybe amazon's?
Figuring out a good business model (or a way to survive without one) is indeed the challenge here! I'm not sure that AWS's margins will support this (and historically they haven't been great at supporting open-source anyway)
The fact that so much of the world's private source code is on a single public website (GitHub), which has repeatedly been hacked via relatively easy exploits, is pretty frightening to me.
Not sure it helps, but an observation is that Oracle's relational database occupied a somewhat similar role, in that it tied together data from different sources, and enabled cross-platform interoperation. This was very important at the time, because there were several different hardware vendors, and companies didn't want to get locked in. And of course, a whole ecosystem of third-party tools grew up around Oracle - esp reporting tools, BI, warehousing, and everything had bindings for relational databases.
Not sure how that translates as a business model, as no one owns git (like Oracle owned oracle). However, although Sun didn't make money from java, everyone else did - so there is a business model, just as a user of git, not an owner. e.g. reporting tools based on git; CI tools, code quality tools.
So maybe the answer is to just to treat git as infrastructure, for the app you sell, as opposed to trying to make money from the infrastructure itself. Linux is a similar product.
Customers fear vendor lock-in, so an open platform/ecosystem for git could flourish, like java. Hopefully they'll have a better business model for it than Sun did. Maybe amazon's?