> Its arguable that Elastic simply hasn’t come up with an open-source compatible business model, and that’s fine. But its not Amazon’s fault.

Exactly this.

Or more accurately, Elastic is pretending it doesn't have an open-source compatible business model.

The actual truth is, they've built a great business. $500MM in yearly revenue, with 40+% y/y growth, for a valuation of like $15B last time I checked. And yet they're trying to pretend this is a David vs Goliath story and that they're literally going to go out of business because of Amazon. Nope, it's all gaslighting. They don't need to make this license change, without it they'll still be a $50B business in a decade or less.

They're just having an immature childish response because, while they're making boatloads of money, Amazon is also making boatloads of money, and that's not fair in their eyes because Amazon didn't invent Elasticsearch. It's all so childish (and ignores the tremendous value AWS as a whole is, but that's another rant)

ES had a business model. It was open-core, but with critical features like Security and Access-Control hidden behind their paid support.

The core disagreement was that Amazon (and many other contributors) wanted to add that to the base distribution, and Elasticsearch fought them for years on it, deliberately breaking any community plugins that got a solution working.

Enough blame for the current situation on all sides.

Yeah, I simplified things for the sake of argument, but just to be clear, the whole open core business model was a huge conflict of interest and has convinced me that open core is a way worse conflict of interest than other ways to monetize (enterprise support, operating cloud service etc).

So, to call Elastic a successful open-source business model isn't quite accurate, and you're correct to point that out.

please add disclaimers if you work at amz

I don’t, I work for a non-profit that refuses to run proprietary software such as Elasticsearch 7.1.1 in prod. Not sure why you made that blind assumption. Very bizarre.

Thank you for pointing this out. I used to run elasticsearch on a project and these pay walled features were a large source of frustration to the point that eventually I recommended moving it to the AWS service because we were already paying amazon anyway and in a large organization it is a huge pain to contract another vendor.

> Its arguable that Elastic simply hasn’t come up with an open-source compatible business model, and that’s fine. But its not Amazon’s fault.

I think this is precisely correct, and it's really strange to me that a company developing innovative software would decide to apache license all of their work but I still feel for them. I'm guessing that they wanted to build a thing and make some money off of it while mostly just contributing to moving tech forward and that's a super noble goal... but that noble goal would have been much better served by using a license better tailored to OSS free use for non-commercial purposes and pursuing individual agreements for commercial use.

Then again, if it was launched with such stringent requirements would so many contributors have helped them develop into such a usable product?

> Its arguable that Elastic simply hasn’t come up with an open-source compatible business model, and that’s fine. But its not Amazon’s fault.

Elastic has indeed found a profitable business model: they have their own cloud (cloud.elastic.co). But for it to be profitable they need to cover the costs of both developing the Elastic stack, and running a SaaS. AWS only has to cover the cost of running a SaaS (since they are getting the stack for free) which gives them a HUGE cost-wise advantage.

To counter this advantage Elastic is asking them to partner with them like other cloud providers do (Microsoft, Google, Alibaba etc) but AWS has refused to do that.

Isn't it then fair for Elastic to restrict AWS from using their software?