Except elasticsearch was created before the company Elastic even existed. They couldn’t have released it as closed source because they weren’t there to release it at all.
It was written by one guy and it was based on previous open source code in Lucene.
I am ok with them making money off their project, but it isn’t like they are owed a billion dollar company for their work.
That "one guy" is the CEO and founder of the company. You are making it seem like some guy developed an open source database, and a company later came around and built a business out of it, when that wasn't the case.
Most open source to commercial success stories like Kafka, Mongodb, and Elastic do seem to follow similar path.
Any money made from here on out is not based on the work of creating the software, but on helping people use it. If Amazon does a better job of that than Elastic, than they should win the competition.
You're asserting a comparison where none was made.
If that isn't what you meant then perhaps we are in agreement. :-)
I wasn't trying to imply anything about where most of the functionality was coming from.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elasticsearch
While I still think this phrasing is unfair, it certainly seems to be the consensus. At least when measured by Google search results.
https://www.google.com/search?q=%22Elasticsearch%20is%20a%20...
Because no other companies build on a foundation of open-source software today? I think that describes every company. Yes, the actual core product is the open-source software, not just components of it, but does that really matter?
I don't understand the distinction you're trying to make here.
I don't really know where I fall on this subject. Companies need a route to monetize when developing open source products. It feels like AWS has been closing many ways to do that. Short term it might feel good for us end users, but long term it's probably bad for the ecosystem.
I am happy to let them compete to see who can offer the best value.