On the contrary, the commons gets the version of ElasticSearch that is most useful to end users. If Elastic can offer better service to end-users, their deployment will be more popular and people will prefer their patches; if AWS can offer better service to end-users, their deployment will be more popular.
Not really, because Elastic doesn't get money from people using their free product. So, Elastic could theoretically go bankrupt even while providing an arbitrarily more popular ElasticSearch version.
AWS on the other hand is charging money for using their service, so they only need to compete with Elastic on the hosted version of ES. If their fork of ES is very hard to host on your own, that's a net benefit to AWS, regardless of how easy Elastic's fork is in the same scenarios - neither company is making money off the non-hosted version.
Network effects are great for behemoths but not so good for consumers.
I'm skeptical though.
If that were the point of the licensing, it'd be encoded in the license. This is the branding of the license, which is just innuendo. Amazon doesn't belong to any church that recognizes the spirit of Open Source, instead they just read the license and follow it.
I think the point of OSS - and there are various flavors so this isn't some unitary point, but more like a general direction - is the insight that copyright isn't actually a good model for software development. OSS licenses are a hack to sidestep fundementally misdesigned legal structures while staying within them. But because OSS uses licenses to create a more open development model, it's restricted in what it can do; it's "just" an EULA essentially.
Ideally, we'd fix this in the law, not via tricky licenses, but we don't live in a world where that ideal is anywhere even close to a serious enough problem to be addressed - at least, that's my take on "the point of the [OSS] licensing".
The various flavors of OSS try additionally to either use various other approaches to encourage a more open model in a closed world, or conversely don't bother since it's a hopeless endeavor, or vary exactly how open they want things to be; but the general gist is that the license is a hack; it's a design limitation, not by design.
Yeah — clearly they're acting in total accordance with their own interests. My point is that they're acting contrary to ours.
They make perfectly legal use of that code. What they're doing seems to be in my interest because if they do it, it means I could also establish a business using permissive code to run it and hopefully make money off it. It's good news for many wannabe startup founders out there.
Suppose Elastic had used GPL instead. Then Amazon's hands are tied to a greater extent, but we still lose out. If AWS is the one maintaining ElasticSearch, then ES will steadily become more and more nichely-suited to being a part of the Amazon cloud and less suited to a self-hosted use case. Users can patch it for their own use-cases, but they'll never be able to make it as good as it would have been if there were full-time maintainers supporting them. The commons still become less rich.
The dream is that Elastic can keep maintaining ES but ES remains Apache2. Given AWS's presence in the market, it seems like that's not an especially viable option. For Elastic to keep maintaining ES while switching ES to a more restrictive license which doesn't prevent normal use cases but hamstrings AWS is less desirable, but still preferable to Elastic folding, because ES remains a tool which we can all use and patch as needed to power our own services.