Elastic's business model is entirely predicated on a symbiotic relationship with the open source project. Amazon doesn't have any business incentive to be the primary sponsor of the open source project; certainly not in the long term. Seems pretty obvious to me.
Re:Open Distro for Elasticsearch
by houseofzeus on Tuesday March 12, 2019 @06:02PM
(#19373523)
At that point it becomes about the nuance of defining what is really best for open source. Is it long term maintenance of ElasticSearch as it exists today, in which case I agree Elastic has the best incentive to keep it going, or is it net new open source code in which case Amazon is bringing new plugins to the table. I suspect in practice this is more of a spectrum than an obvious either/or.
The ability to fork in open source is a feature not a bug and ultimately the community of users and developers of these projects will decide what works best for them. In this case it isn't even a fork, it's new plugins that the community can consume under a FOSS license.