Elastic is a 14 billion dollar company[0] with 43% revenue growth YoY[1]. Amazon may be eating into their SaaS market share but Elastic are hardly struggling. Relicensing for competitive business reasons is absolutely fine, but it's silly to pretend that they are doing this for any motive other than making more money. Certainly this is not some altruistic move on the behalf of the open source community.
I think that this attempt to take a popular open-source project proprietary is going to blow up in their faces. Users will flock to OpenDistro and this will be the beginning of the end of Elastic unless they reverse this decision.
It's really hard to have sympathy for anyone here. On the Amazon side, they of course are pushing on that ethical gray line by using Elastic's name and track record to build their own offering based on Elastic's Open Source software.
On the Elastic's side they simply seem to be mad that Open Source is working exactly as it's supposed to work in favor of a big company that happens to be a competitor. It's like they want to have discretionary control on who benefits from Open Source and who doesn't.
I believe this is the real driver of this decision. $ESTC's PE is -100 and PC is -2500, they need to drive a lot of business to their hosted cloud or sell many more licenses to support their valuation [^1], and they're not getting the subscriptions they need from the platform add-ons like Machine Learning, APM, and SIEM (43% YoY revenue growth is great, but I don't believe it's sustainable, and this licensing decision suggests neither does Elastic).
Base Elasticsearch and Kibana are sufficient for a large portion of use cases, including mine. Many other of the "ecosystem" tools they sell have other, established commercial or open-source options (e.g. Splunk vs SIEM, Jaeger/OpenTracing vs APM), and these options won't tie you into the Elastic environment.
> I think that this attempt to take a popular open-source project proprietary is going to blow up in their faces. Users will flock to OpenDistro and this will be the beginning of the end of Elastic unless they reverse this decision.
100% agree. We're going to see an open-source fork, whether from Open Distro (which may have too much baggage) or a new, rebranded project, and many users who don't need Elastic's value-adds will flock there.
^1: Admittedly everything tech is severely overpriced right now.
I think that this attempt to take a popular open-source project proprietary is going to blow up in their faces. Users will flock to OpenDistro and this will be the beginning of the end of Elastic unless they reverse this decision.
[0] https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/ESTC/ [1] https://s2.q4cdn.com/265747582/files/doc_financials/2021/q2/...