robcowart

This can't happen because Lucene is controlled by the ASF, not a commercial entity.

Allowing one of various foundations to take control of an open source project, can be beneficial for the community as its licensing is unlikely to change in the future. However it does present challenges for any future commercialization.

A good example of this is Confluent, which was founded by the creators of Kafka. LinkedIn, where Kafka was originally developed, transferred control of Kafka to the ASF. As the original developers, the Confluent team still has a lot of influence and contributes a lot of code to Kafka, but they do not wield absolute control. While this has presented some challenges to build a Kafka-centric business, and even led to them creating their own Kafka fork ("Confluent Server") they have still been successful. The community also has long-term confidence in the Kafka's license.

"Trust" may be too strong of a word. I would say that one should expect more consistent and predictable behavior from a foundation. I have however seen some questionable actions in the name of the ASF, where the motivations were obviously influenced by project committee members with a commercial interest.

That can't really happen. While Elasticsearch was previously released under the Apache 2.0 license, it was still "owned" by Elastic.

Lucene on the other hand, is "owned" by the Apache Software Foundation (ASF). While companies can build products based on Lucene, which they release under their own choice of License, they cannot change the Lucene license itself. Only the ASF can do that.

Another example of this is Kafka. It was developed at LinkedIn, who transferred control to the ASF. When the LinkedIn employees who originally created Kafka, left to form Confluent, they had no control over the licensing of Kafka. They could only decide on the License for the Kafka add-ons that they provide. Eventually (about a year ago) they forked Kafka to create "Confluent Server", which is released under their proprietary license. Kafka itself however remains open source under Apache 2.0 license, still controlled by the ASF.

The source code for the various components that make up Open Distro is already freely available under an Apache 2.0 license. This change will have zero direct impact on Open Distro. The SSPL restrictions apply when the licensed software is used to provide a service.

It is the AWS Elasticsearch Service that will be directly impacted. It will be limited to Elasticsearch 7.10.x as a foundation. Unless of course AWS makes available the code that they use to orchestrate and manage that service. Assuming that that code is sufficiently uncoupled from other systems, they could perhaps do exactly that. It would certainly be an entertaining counter-move from AWS.

Prior to this move, the default install of the Elastic Stack was 100% open source. X-Pack had to be intentionally installed as a plugin.

Now the default install includes X-Pack, and you have to go out of your way (assuming you even realize that there is difference) to install the 100% Apache 2.0 licensed version.