Elastic is welcome to license their code how they want. If they want to write a license that says “to use our code, everything down to the billing stack must be open source”, they’re welcome to. But when they license their code and then throw a tantrum when Amazon uses the code in line with the license, I’ve got no sympathy for them.
This is one of those rare situations where I can see both sides and I'm thankful I don't have to make the decisions Elastic.co did. Most open source companies don't have to worry too much about competitors grabbing their code and forking it because they have the expertise needed to improve and support it and there isn't much incentive for customers to leave them. But this is Amazon we're talking about. They can package up the code and charge next to nothing for it (not that they are doing that) and make their money on compute and bandwidth charges.
That said I wish Elastic had chosen a better license and I wish they wouldn't charge for basic security options like SAML, RBAC, and encryption.
edit: And IIRC this all started because Amazon added authentication and RBAC to open source ELK and tried to submit the changes back to Elastic, which rejected them.
>> That said I wish Elastic had chosen a better license and I wish they wouldn't charge for basic security options like SAML, RBAC, and encryption.
What better licenses or monetization strategy would have allowed them to charge enterprises who use it for more commercial purposes, and allow the individuals/casual users to use it for free?
