> they don't have any intention to develop this software without a profit, then they shouldn't have positioned themselves as a free-and-open-source product in the first place.
If something satisfies the four freedoms [0], it is free software.
If something satisfies the four freedoms [0], it is free software.
Nonetheless I don't agree with the GNU's claim that copyleft doesn't reduce freedoms. Of course a permissive license provides more freedoms: it's right there in the name
But this issue isn't really about permissive vs copyleft licensing anyway: Had Apache used a copyleft license with Lucene, Elasticsearch would have never existed.
Lucene is a library, you can hardly offer it as SaaS. It's gluework.
On the other hand, Elastic is much more enduser software, which is much more routinely abused for SaaS hosting by larger corporations.