Looking at it rationally, is furthering open source admirable when it's done by a community activist, and loathsome when it's done by someone who has a business interest in the exact same outcome? Why isn't the end result the most important part of the equation? If a stronger, open sourced Elasticsearch comes out of this, why is that a bad thing because it was backed by Amazon?

Just be honest, and don't pretend to be open source, when you are attempting to harness goodwill towards open source in order to make a buck. As pointed out, ES builds on the work of hundreds of other contributors to other open source projects. Is Elastic compensating those developers?

> don't pretend to be open source

In my mind, a company that makes lots of free contributes to open source is an open-source-friendly company, but this thread and the other on the Elastic post made me realize just how many people think that a True Open Source Company (whatever that means) should prefer to go out of business to dealing in proprietary software.

I personally don't care for any of these puritanical viewpoints that deny economic realities (there's only so much a person or a collective can afford to give away for free, money doesn't grow on trees, etc). Open source is good, but thriving, sustainable open source depends on a symbiotic relationship with for-profit institutions.