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>It was written by one guy and it was based on previous open source code in Lucene.

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.

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At least as per the wikipedia page[1], there is a lag of 2 years between product and company, and there prior history of him working on similar products. So I think it is reasonable to give benefit of the doubt that open source product was created in good faith and commercial interests only got explored later.

Most open source to commercial success stories like Kafka, Mongodb, and Elastic do seem to follow similar path.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elasticsearch#History

No, but my point is one guy wrote it and has made a lot of money from it. He has been more than compensated for his work.

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.

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