> Elastic built a popular product off the work of countless open source contributors. That's how they became a market leader in this product space.
That's simply not true. Elasticsearch and Kibana are primarily built by developers on the Elastic payroll.
You can verify this by looking at the "Contributors" tab on Github for both projects. I honestly couldn't find a single person there who wasn't employed by Elastic at the time of their contributions.
> The people who contributed to the product did so with no expectation of reward except that their efforts would remain open source
Again, did you do a survey of any of these people? Seeing they are Elastic employees I guess they asked for more than just OSS glory... Probably lunch and and a pay check.
> But yanking the Apache license out and moving to a more-restrictive license is not the right solution, and is not what everyone who contributed to building the product signed up for.
What would you suggest, at this point in time, that Elastic did instead?
They released the projects as OSS 10 years ago - there's no changing that. Now they need to stop Amazon or they might not survive as a company.
I'm honestly interested to hear your suggestion.
Personally I'd theoretically be ok with having contributed long ago, and the company now going SSPL. Not that easy to have known, that far back, how things would turn out.
> need to stop Amazon or they might not survive as a company
They make lots of money, but also have high salary costs, right. I wonder if you looked at the numbers and growth / profitablity, and concluded that they're at risk, or if you're assuming
That's simply not true. Elasticsearch and Kibana are primarily built by developers on the Elastic payroll. You can verify this by looking at the "Contributors" tab on Github for both projects. I honestly couldn't find a single person there who wasn't employed by Elastic at the time of their contributions.
> The people who contributed to the product did so with no expectation of reward except that their efforts would remain open source
Again, did you do a survey of any of these people? Seeing they are Elastic employees I guess they asked for more than just OSS glory... Probably lunch and and a pay check.
> But yanking the Apache license out and moving to a more-restrictive license is not the right solution, and is not what everyone who contributed to building the product signed up for.
What would you suggest, at this point in time, that Elastic did instead? They released the projects as OSS 10 years ago - there's no changing that. Now they need to stop Amazon or they might not survive as a company. I'm honestly interested to hear your suggestion.