It's hard for me to know whether to feel bad for ES in this case. Did they bring it on themselves? Is Amazon too big and a bully?
From my perspective, Amazon has made most of its profit price gouging consumers on bandwidth after vendor locking them into their ecosystem, where they bootstrap new services by wrapping open source software with some provisioning scripts, management dashboards and cookie-cutter API / console templates. Indeed, most of this is templated -- AFAIU, for example, each AWS service autogenerates its Boto bindings and parts of its console frontend via code generators. Amazon has really mastered the factory process of churning out new services, and when they find a popular one, they can invest more resources into developing it than the original team ever could.
And therein lies the rub. If Amazon is improving the software in a way that the original team couldn't, it's hard to say that the community isn't benefiting. I think what strikes me the wrong way is that Amazon is not doing it for any altruistic reason. In fact, Amazon contributes very little to open source in general, considering how much they take from it. Compare them to Facebook (React, etc) or Google (tons of dev tools) or Microsoft (VSC, TypeScript). What does Amazon have? Firecracker, kind of? And now a fork of ES because that's the only way they could continue making money off it without violating the license a small startup put in place to stop them?
Well, good for Amazon, I suppose, but I find myself instinctively disliking them for this. I'm not sure what the solution is. Hopefully technologies like Kubernetes and Terraform will encourage big customers to become at least cloud-agnostic, if not cloud-independent. At the very least it would be great if Amazon / Google / Microsoft stopped gouging bandwidth at such absurd margins. Or not. Maybe it will be their downfall as startups differentiate along those lines. That would be ironic, coming from the originators of "your margin is my opportunity."
Personally I'm doing my part by not building anything with vendor lock-in. It's great to be able to deploy to any cloud, if you value either robustness or flexibility.
> In fact, Amazon contributes very little to open source in general, considering how much they take from it
I don’t think this is a fact. Amazon seems to contribute pretty significantly according to the pages [0,1] they put out that describes their contributions. Not to mention their membership in OSS foundations like Linux Foundation. [2]
You have the caveat about in relation to benefit they gain, but that’s pretty hard to measure. And I think isn’t really a good measure.
I’d like to learn more about why you make such an absolute claim and maybe you have some better measure.
I remember back in the 90s when big orgs (Microsoft, IBM) didn’t contribute to open source and can’t even think of any big orgs today that don’t contribute to open source. Even Oracle has big open source projects.
[0] https://amzn.github.io/ [1] https://aws.amazon.com/opensource/ [2] https://www.linuxfoundation.org/en/join/members/