Elastic, at this moment, is pulling in half a billion dollars in revenue per year. They're growing at at least 40% y/y. They're valued at $15B at this very moment.
So, tell me again why this license change is so necessary? Oh right, it's not, it's just a disingenuous move to try to monopolize the market they're in.
Except, the irony is, this isn't even going to increase the money they're making, because Amazon, as I predicted days ago, was always just gonna fork 7.1.0 and keep it Apache 2.0. Which is not only legally their right, but actually ethically is a good thing to do anyway.
And don't even get me started on how Elastic puts most of its real efforts into their proprietary features anyway, and if you hypothetically opened up a pull request that perfectly implemented TLS or some other feature they'd deny it because they have a conflict of interest with X-Pack.
Now I want to be clear. I'm personally an anarcho-capitalist, I reject the whole idea that a company being big makes it evil. I don't think it's a problem that Amazon is making money with free software - aren't all of us in the industry making money with Linux, or with apache httpd, or <insert open source software here>?
So, I don't hold the fact that Elastic is a multi billion dollar company against them either. But when they try to gaslight the communtity and portray this absurd, patently false, downright offensive david vs goliath narrative, I'm going to call them out for being liars, because that's what they are. They have shown they will break deep promises they made to the community without a second thought.
They've also shown they couldn't even be honest in their communication around this licensing change. They claimed this would have no effect on their users - bullshit, a good friend of mine works at Wikimedia and they can't run Elasticsearch 7.1.1 or above in the future because they don't run proprietary software. Meanwhile the license change doesn't even do what they claim it's for.
They also have mastered the art of doublespeak like this:
> The list of improvements under this new free and open, yet proprietary, license, is overwhelming
Ah yes, the infamous "free and open, yet proprietary" software. Couldn't live without it.