I have to disagree, I see no reason to think that Elasticsearch is seeking to avoid "the drawbacks" of a permissive license. I believe the project has been using a permissive license since it's first release in 2010.

What they are objecting to is having their project co-opted by Amazon, one of the largest and wealthiest technology companies in the world. Elasticsearch and Amazon have been battling this out for a couple of years now, this is the latest move in that battle.[0] They have been very clear that the reason they are changing the license is Amazon, not "the drawbacks" of an open source license.

[0]: https://searchaws.techtarget.com/news/252471650/AWS-faces-El...

That Amazon can do this is "the drawback" here.

They could also collaborate with Elastic as a customer. In fact, the model where a company develops a managed service and offers it on cloud providers infrastructure (i.e. "app store") would have everyone benefit:

* Amazon, from the wealth of innovative managed services they could offer without fully maintaining them themselves

* OSS companies, for the ability to financially sustain their projects and still offer it for free for those that want to self host without offering a managed version of the same software

* End users, who can both use the software however they wish and also choose to get a nice managed version of it.

Instead what will happen due to AWS behavior here is that there will be a lot less incentive to develop innovative new services, at least in a non-proprietary way => therefore there will be fewer services in general for AWS to offer without doing all the product work from scratch, fewer tools in general for engineers and fewer OSS tools in particular and more Firebase-like offerings. So everybody loses here in the long run.

I'm going to go on a limb and say that whichever of the cloud providers figures out the "app store" equivalent for managed services is going to be able to take over from AWS.

Commented on your earlier comment, but didn't see another user basically wrote the same thing, as I hadn't refreshed. Isn't Amazon just an "end user" in this case? End user doesn't have to mean someone who queries an ElasticSearch cluster, it could be someone who hosts one and charges for that.

Are Amazon writing the software that transforms and loads the data into ES, as well queries ES? If yes, they are an end-user. If not, they are a managed service provider.

There is no ambiguity in this case, they are offering the exact same elasticsearch API.

But this is not even the point. I'm not interested in the legal distinctions here at all, thats for the lawyers to delineate in more detail. The point is that Amazon are practically throwing away a huge business opportunity that would also encourage more FOSS to be built in a sustainable way ("app store" / "managed service store") for some short term gain, by throwing companies such as MongoDB and Elastic under the bus.

Totally agree. I think you could also say a similar thing about Amazon however: they are benefiting off of the permissive license Elastic chose to use, without the drawback of having to spend developer time improving the open source project they are profiting from.