> Elastic built a popular product off the work of countless open source contributors. That's how they became a market leader in this product space.
That's simply not true. Elasticsearch and Kibana are primarily built by developers on the Elastic payroll.
You can verify this by looking at the "Contributors" tab on Github for both projects. I honestly couldn't find a single person there who wasn't employed by Elastic at the time of their contributions.
> The people who contributed to the product did so with no expectation of reward except that their efforts would remain open source
Again, did you do a survey of any of these people? Seeing they are Elastic employees I guess they asked for more than just OSS glory... Probably lunch and and a pay check.
> But yanking the Apache license out and moving to a more-restrictive license is not the right solution, and is not what everyone who contributed to building the product signed up for.
What would you suggest, at this point in time, that Elastic did instead?
They released the projects as OSS 10 years ago - there's no changing that. Now they need to stop Amazon or they might not survive as a company.
I'm honestly interested to hear your suggestion.
> Its arguable that Elastic simply hasn’t come up with an open-source compatible business model, and that’s fine. But its not Amazon’s fault.
Elastic has indeed found a profitable business model: they have their own cloud (cloud.elastic.co). But for it to be profitable they need to cover the costs of both developing the Elastic stack, and running a SaaS. AWS only has to cover the cost of running a SaaS (since they are getting the stack for free) which gives them a HUGE cost-wise advantage.
To counter this advantage Elastic is asking them to partner with them like other cloud providers do (Microsoft, Google, Alibaba etc) but AWS has refused to do that.
Isn't it then fair for Elastic to restrict AWS from using their software?
That's not the exactly what's been happening. I'll give you a more accurate timeline
Elastic: Hey here is some software. You are free to use it without paying us
Community: Awesome!
... years go by and the community is loving it, Elastic is loving it everything is great
AWS: Wow! Free, popular software. Millions of dollars already invested in it so we don't have to. We'll take it for free and sell it.
... years go by
Elastic: Hey AWS! So glad you like our software but we can see that your actions are hurting our business which will hurt the software and the community in the future if we don't do anything. What do you think about making a deal?
AWS: Lol, suck it.
... years go by where other cloud providers make deals with Elastic
Elastic: Okay AWS, from now on we are changing our license so you and other companies similar to yours cannot re-sell it
AWS (and their fans): What, how dare you?! We've made millions by reselling it as our own, and not you are going to restrict us doing exactly that. You dick!
That's simply not true. Elasticsearch and Kibana are primarily built by developers on the Elastic payroll. You can verify this by looking at the "Contributors" tab on Github for both projects. I honestly couldn't find a single person there who wasn't employed by Elastic at the time of their contributions.
> The people who contributed to the product did so with no expectation of reward except that their efforts would remain open source
Again, did you do a survey of any of these people? Seeing they are Elastic employees I guess they asked for more than just OSS glory... Probably lunch and and a pay check.
> But yanking the Apache license out and moving to a more-restrictive license is not the right solution, and is not what everyone who contributed to building the product signed up for.
What would you suggest, at this point in time, that Elastic did instead? They released the projects as OSS 10 years ago - there's no changing that. Now they need to stop Amazon or they might not survive as a company. I'm honestly interested to hear your suggestion.