> I've made several contributions to ELK, and my only motive has been that it's useful open source software, and I want to make it more useful. I personally don't care who profits off the codebase, I think anybody should be free to. I personally would object to anybody trying to lock down how it can be used, and would see any attempt to do so as running completely counter to my personal motivations as a past contributor.
This x 10000. I couldn't agree more, thanks for putting that so clearly.
Frankly, I think a number of people in the Open Core movement have a psychological hangup around profit. They feel that if a company - particularly a large corporation - is making money using their software without "contributing back", that that should not be allowed. Well, if you don't want to allow it, fine, but don't pretend you're in the business of releasing free software - you're not. You want to be in the business of proprietary software, since only proprietary software lets you say "hey I don't want Jeff to profit off of my work without paying my for a proprietary license".