In contrast, a number of people here are acting as if AWS is totally in the wrong. But the only wrong here is Elastic making the mistake and then acting as if the whole thing is AWS' fault. No, if you license your software improperly that's on you, not anyone else.
Elastic made a strategic mistake, and Amazon made the jerk move that was open to them.
Amazon built the product with the hope that it would continue to be developed with that license. What are they supposed to do with the license change? Just accept whatever Elastic said? I don't think you can blame them for taking the last version where they agreed with the license and continue to use and develop it. Sure, maybe making it open is a bit of a jab back, but even in isolation it makes sense for them.
They’re also switching out the license under everyone else. It’s maybe notable that elastics cloud offering was acquired at some point (it used to be found.io). I used to do elasticsearch consulting and I could name a few customers that will now have to reevaluate their product.
They're a hosting company, they're hosting open source software and they're doing it well.
Preventing companies from hosting the software with propietary changes can be done with licenses like the AGPL, but again, the objective is not to disallow commercial use, but rather to force the source code to be available for the users of the software.
These people have this bizarre fusion of capitalist and communist reasoning, I really can't reconcile it. On the one hand they seem to think profit is fundamentally evil, but on the other hand they seem to think the problem is that Elastic isn't being allowed to monopolize all the profit.
Well, which is it? Did Elastic release non-restrictively-licensed free software out of the goodness of their hearts, giving it away with no expectation of a return? Or did they create this codebase purely for profit, and thus have no claim to moral highground? It's all so silly and childish.
And the biggest irony is, Elastic is already a successful business. They're trying to pretend their business model is not viable as long as Amazon keeps operating, which is just gaslighting.
Licenses exist for a reason. The onus is on the person choosing the license to choose one which aligns with their intentions. You cannot and should not expect downstream consumers of the software to confine themselves to some subset of the actual license's allowed activities just because it's the "nice" thing to do (as of course this assumes morality is in any way objective).