>It was written by one guy and it was based on previous open source code in Lucene.

That "one guy" is the CEO and founder of the company. You are making it seem like some guy developed an open source database, and a company later came around and built a business out of it, when that wasn't the case.

At least as per the wikipedia page[1], there is a lag of 2 years between product and company, and there prior history of him working on similar products. So I think it is reasonable to give benefit of the doubt that open source product was created in good faith and commercial interests only got explored later.

Most open source to commercial success stories like Kafka, Mongodb, and Elastic do seem to follow similar path.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elasticsearch#History

No, but my point is one guy wrote it and has made a lot of money from it. He has been more than compensated for his work.

Any money made from here on out is not based on the work of creating the software, but on helping people use it. If Amazon does a better job of that than Elastic, than they should win the competition.

Elasticsearch offers _a lot_ above and beyond what you get out-of-the-box with Lucene. For sure, the Lucene library is used by Elasticsearch but this comparison is way off base.

It wasn't a comparison, it was a statement of fact, which I think is true, no? ES was based on OS from Lucene, or it was not.

You're asserting a comparison where none was made.

In my opinion, the phrase "based on" implies that a lot of the Elasticsearch functionality is actually Lucene functionality. I disagree that this is the case, I think there is a lot of functionality that Elasticsearch brings that is really othogonal to the Lucene project (sharding, multi-tenancy of indexes, clustering, managing nodes, etc.) Again, you my opinion, definitely enough for it's own project.

If that isn't what you meant then perhaps we are in agreement. :-)

Honestly, I was just quoting the opening line of the Wikipedia page.

I wasn't trying to imply anything about where most of the functionality was coming from.

Since you have mentioned this I have read three more articles and short blurbs about this kerfuffle and _they all_ have used the same "based on Lucene" text when describing Elasticsearch. As you say, Wikipedia seems to be the one true source of this phrasing!

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elasticsearch

While I still think this phrasing is unfair, it certainly seems to be the consensus. At least when measured by Google search results.

https://www.google.com/search?q=%22Elasticsearch%20is%20a%20...

> I am ok with them making money off their project, but it isn’t like they are owed a billion dollar company for their work.

Because no other companies build on a foundation of open-source software today? I think that describes every company. Yes, the actual core product is the open-source software, not just components of it, but does that really matter?

I don't understand the distinction you're trying to make here.

Complaining about AWS building off open source software when you did too seems a bit awkward. I'd be willing to bet AWS has spent at least as many person-hours developing their service as has been put into ES itself.

I don't really know where I fall on this subject. Companies need a route to monetize when developing open source products. It feels like AWS has been closing many ways to do that. Short term it might feel good for us end users, but long term it's probably bad for the ecosystem.

My distinction is that I don’t think they are being abused. They want to build a business around an open source tool just like AWS wants to also build a business around an open source tool.

I am happy to let them compete to see who can offer the best value.

They actually have their billion dollar company, if they think they're owed it - Elastic has a market cap of over $14 billion.