Yeah, and here I feel that there's something missing in my description. While I think Elastics move is bad I definitely don't feel like Amazon is the good guy here either. I feel that there's a good chance that Amazon steam rolls Elastic and then five ten years away the community is worse off.

Open Source makes the most sense when your position is “I made this because it solved a problem I had and am giving it away so that it might solve problems for you.”

We might actually be better off with Amazon as the steward because they don’t need to make money on the software itself.

> need to make money on the software itself.

It would make a lot of sense for them to slowly close it down or modify it so that it eventually only makes sense to use it on their platform. Or something similar. And given what I've seen from their behaviour I would expect them to exploit whatever market leverage they can.

What you described is exactly what Elastic doing now, and it triggers a fork. We will be fine if it happens again.

Depends if they actually develop it. For other open source software, they usually keep improvements (say, improvements to Spark working with S3 from EMR, to give example from my area) to themselves in proprietary modules.