You say "system has big problems"... so if you had magic power to pass any law and have everyone follow it, what would that law be?

I am guessing you didn't like how Amazon was profiting from ElasticSearch's work.. so would you retrospectively change ElasticSearch's license to SSPL? Or maybe help all companies: prohibit all permissive licenses (Apache, MIT, BSD etc..) entirely and force people to either AGPL, SSPL or fully commercial? Or make a law that no free software license may apply to companies with >$1 billion in revenue?

While we are at it, how about prohibiting commercial flat-rate unlimited site licenses? The huge companies can take advantage of those too.

The thing is, I bet Elastic's original decision to use Apache was to get more users, at the expense of also getting more competition. Now they have their users but they don't like the price they paid for it. This may have been a bad business decision on their part.. but I don't see "big problems" there, companies make bad business decisions all the time.

Don’t forget that the core of elastic is lucene, the full text library that is also the core of solr and that has an Apache license, without lucene elastic wouldn’t exist.

I can see several cases where open sourcing your core product will be very helpful to your company at one phase and harmful in another. Whether that’s a big problem in the system is a topic that people will differ on.

I get it, you see this as complaining about how things shifted when this is a tradeoff they embraced from the start.

But there are situations where it's not that things changed, with companies that would love to be open source but it would hurt them at all phases.

If you have to be super proprietary to make any money off software, that's bad for everyone.

When a piece of code is responsible for enormous amounts of money and none of that goes to the author, that's a bad way to get more code and a bad way to support valuable authors.

Does the presence of AGPL address most (almost all?) of your concern? It seems like that would offer individual users freedom to use and modify the source while precluding Amazon from monetizing it effectively.

Those same properties of AGPL mean it’s generally viewed as not as effective at attracting a community of early users, but in a case where the alternative is proprietary-only and the company “wants” to be open-source, AGPL seems a better option for them.

AGPL only requires modified software used over a network to be contributed back. If it isn’t modified, no need!

If it isn't modified the AGPL is basically the same as "we use XYZ and you can download its source code from xyz.com" plus the copyleft.

I think what would solve my main concern here is a small royalty, but I also think it would be very difficult to implement in a fair way.