I think this is the key.

My main problem with the pro-Elastic arguments it that the crux of the argument is:

1. Elastic drives the vast majority of development for ES 2. Elastic needs revenue in order to keep paying devs to work on ES 3. AWS is competing too well with Elastic's hosted ES

And there is an underlying implication that if Elastic fails, ES development will stall almost completely and a great software project will die. But like... isn't that the point of OSS? If a software project lives and dies with a single company, what exactly is the point of it being OSS?

>AWS is competing too well with Elastic's hosted ES

AWS is too big to really be competing fairly. They have vendor lockin on customers, an enormous war chest they can (and have) used for predatory pricing and they control, like, 1/2 the hosting market.

With all that they can almost murder elastic search in their sleep without providing a better service.

That will not just be bad for ES it will be bad for everyone who isn't Bezos.

> >AWS is competing too well with Elastic's hosted ES

> AWS is too big to really be competing fairly. They have vendor lockin on customers, an enormous war chest they can (and have) used for predatory pricing and they control, like, 1/2 the hosting market.

> With all that they can almost murder elastic search in their sleep without providing a better service.

> That will not just be bad for ES it will be bad for everyone who isn't Bezos.

There's a lot of businesses with a lot of budget who want to use ES and don't want to go near AWS. Let's not pretend there's not an enormous opportunity out there for a good hosted ES platform not on AWS.

I think the "war chest" argument here is that AWS can out compete any other hosting solution by "slowly burning" their way to the top. AWS is a conglomerate and can afford to lose money on a single service. Companies like ES cannot without going under. It is monopolistic behavior and that is harmful.

It's really not a monopoly though? There are quite a few cloud providers.

AWS has lots of services. Customers like it when all of their cloud is managed under one roof (apparently).

AWS is definitely competing fairly, it's just... people like their offering better.

Plenty of businesses compete with AWS just fine. Looking at Elastic Co's financials, they also appear to be competing just fine.

If they tell you they're not, what they're actually saying is that they've chosen a poor business model.

In this case, it looks like they've got a perfectly reasonable business, but they're upset it's not even bigger, and therefore they'd like a monopoly over ES hosting.

> It is monopolistic behavior and that is harmful.

The irony is strong here.

I think a good example company to answer this question would be: What happened to RethinkDB? They shuttered. How has development changed for that project? Is it still alive and healthy?

That would be a single data point to start with, at least.