When will the corporate shilling on HN end?
The core piece of ElasticSearch's technology is Lucene, an open soure project. Elastic the company uses this open source work to become a 5 billion dollar company.
The core piece of AWS's ES service is ElasticSearch, an open source project. Amazon the company uses this open source work to further enrich themselves.
Amazon is bad because they're a 1 trillion dollar company. Elastic is OK because they're a 5 billion dollar company.
Building blocks and libraries offering convenience are not as valuable on its own than solutions that offer some quite immediate value at a reasonably high level. Even if from an abstract view both still require developers as users the applicability is quite different. Amazon cannot 'host' lucene as a service per se.
Services vs Libraries
Your argument makes no sense. Even if we accept the thesis that building block components are up for grabs because they cannot be immediately used as valuable services... Well, neither can services. You need to design a system architecture, figure out how and if a component plays a role, pick a component, config the component, setup a deployment ans scaling strategy, config and integrate metrics and health checks, ingest data, monitor the service, etc etc etc.
And if we actually want to make an objective comparison between libraries and services... Well, in the end they are all components of a larger system.
So, obviously there is no objective distinction. There's only intellectual property and companies being hypocrite wanting to have their cake and eating it too. They can't get it both ways.
Their mongodb clone isn't. It'd be kind of cool if it was, but there's substantial evidence its based on the Aurora Storage engine. Through the docs and various talks at Re:Invent, its clear that the ASE is insanely coupled to AWS, with tight integration to S3 and deep availability-zone awareness. It would be useless beyond an academic exercise to someone who isn't on AWS. It would be cool to see it all open sourced, but not really valuable.
AWS has a pretty strong history of open source in the cloud space, such that it feels strange to me that people still think they're an "enemy" or something. Not as strong as Google or Microsoft, but they're certainly not a New Oracle or anything. You should check out their Open Source Blog [1], and notice that new posts are made literally every two days.
> Yes, the whole argument is based on anti trust, as the article explains.
The only difference -- as you pointed out -- is size.
"Might makes right" is just as untrue as its opposite.
When its convenient for these companies, they're more than happy to release expensive, closed source addons to their "open source core". When its convenient for them, they'll point a finger at Amazon and say "look at how evil they are, they took all the hard work we put into this and want to sell it" (simultaneously, the hundreds of unpaid community contributors in the audience look perturbed, raise their hands to complain, and are immediately shushed, "just ignore them")
"Open Core" companies like Docker, Mongo, or Elastic want to have it both ways; they want the moral high-ground that comes with accepting free contributions from the community, alongside executive power when it comes to deciding what will and wont be open source and who can and cannot use it for what purposes. You shouldn't have it both ways. That doesn't mean you can't build a successful "open core" company (all three of these companies are successful), but lets drop the act of granting them moral superiority. The only reason they exist is because of the exact same licenses and policies which enabled Amazon to do this.
[1] https://github.com/mongodb/mongo/tree/master/src/third_party...