I've always felt guilty by taking for granted the rare breed of virtuous humans that provide free excellent software without relying on advertising. Let's change that and pay, how much would I “lose” anyway?
True, but AWS and the cloud in general likely would've never evolved without top notch free software, i.e. Linux, because the cost would've been prohibitive. I am on a team that runs a small public cloud and there are many systems needed to support the cloud, it's not just the instances/VMs.