I think the problem with Elastic is they have lots of VC investment pushing for a big payout, so it’s not a “pay the hackers” it’s a “make a big payout for founders and investors.” Which I’m not against and think is cool, but I don’t really care about it that much.
The “indoctrinated” industry has created a massive community and even more massive ecosystem of interoperability which almost certainly wouldn’t exist under the walled off from everything else and “fuck everyone” nightmare of the 1990s.
Those 90s walled off isolated companies were significantly more cult like and significantly less effective than the system which won out in the open market—the “GNU propaganda” as you refer to it.
I'm not exactly sure what you mean by "extend existing open source projects". Elastic the company was founded by the creators of Elasticsearch and is the way that its authors and most of its contributors are rewarded with actual cash money.
I think s/he means Elastic's use of Lucene - https://lucene.apache.org/.
The real issue with OS today is that it is too difficult to reward authors and contributors with actual cash money. Until this is fixed, “open source” is doomed to be a bunfight between well funded companies and self appointed governing bodies.
Let’s find a way to pay hackers!