Interesting. ElasticSearch might have OpenOffice'd or Hudson'd themselves.

I would call this MongoDB'd themselves. Except that also would imply that people are still interested in MongoDB. I think their license move probably just accelerated the decline in interest in their product.

Mongo adoption has risen at a rapid rate, and cloud services now make up nearly 40% of their revenue (which, in turn, allows the company to push those $$$ into the core product). Your statement, while a common view on HN, is not correct. Just because tech bros have moved on towards other interests has not meant that adoption of Mongo has faltered. (I am not affiliated with, nor own stock in, MongoDB, Inc in any way)

Nobody can afford to use an Apache 2.0 license when an Amazon type company also uses your product in the same way.

Not everything is a cloud-based VC-backed startup. As big as AWS is, they still miss out on a giant chunk of companies who don't want or are not allowed to go into the cloud, which is why AWS-on-premise exists.

Nobody has to use a license. If you don't feel you can afford it, don't use it.

How many developers does AWS have contributing to ES vs Elastic? Besides those 9 PRs, what has AWS contributed back to ES?

The article does say they made 230+ contributions last year to the OSS Elastic is (was?) built on. Not sure how one counts those, but perhaps it helped Elastic as well?