In a more general way, the Elastic/AWS case proves a more fundamental vulnerability of Open Source as a business model. A couple of weeks ago, I wrote this article called "Why I wouldn't invest in open-source companies, even though I ran one." trying to make this case and point out a couple of systemic pitfalls in OS as a business model (Apologies for the self-promotion, but I felt this might be relevant): https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/why-i-wouldnt-invest-open-sou...
In your post you talk briefly about licensing -- effectively (1) MIT/Apache are common and very permissive (2) AGPL sometimes gets shut down by legal (3) Changing licenses is hard.
Given these primitives, do you think one solution to the problem is just what we see here, a new licensing structure for some types of open source? Elastic's move here, attacking the issue through licensing, is one way that this sort of business model is becoming more robust over time and would be instructive for other founders looking to create revenue generating software that is also open source.
As a developer, the main reason I _love_ open source is that I help patch issues or inspect the code to get a better understanding. Which is great because the changes Elastic are making to their license are orthogonal to the value prop for your average developer.
I wouldn't assume Elastic-style licenses to be a solution going forward. Elastic can use this license model now that they've already achieved considerable popularity and success - but I doubt that they would have gotten to where they are, had they started out with this license.
I think your historical assessment is fair, as usually legal has an allow-list of licenses and anything else is non-trivial to integrate. Moving forward, though, with multiple companies trying to solve issues via licensing (Mongo, Elastic, Confluent), I think we could see some of the new licenses become legal allow-listed (Which allows for some of the moment open-source can give as you mentioned in the link).
Honestly, I think the biggest issue with Elastic-style licenses moving forward is API compatibility. It is just a question of how much money is at stake for a company like Amazon to go from just operationalizing ElasticSearch to running and maintaining an API-compatible fork, just as they've done with Mongo. It would actually be a bit hilarious if Amazon open-sourced said fork with a more permissive license, given that their buck is usually made off of ops.
