I don't think you can have an open source product. In this particular case, Elasticsearch is an open source project that Elastic is a custodian of and has been monetising by building products around it: support, consulting, proprietary extensions, hosting and maybe other things.
Now an industry behemoth has decided to directly compete with one of their products. That's tough, especially that it's done in a typically heavy handed way, but... Elastic's reaction seems highly disingenuous, basically a PR dance around "we love open source but we didn't realise it allows competition to eat into our revenue stream".
Elasticsearch is great precisely because it's an open source project, not a product. Otherwise it would be a yet another proprietary black box thingy, with a hefty price tag and a bunch of corporate users. As a project, it thrives, enjoys trust, dedicated community, contributions, enthusiast adoption effect, and so on.
I'm sure they could still make plenty of money from their other products, introduce new ones, maybe even get a huge new stream of support contracts from AWS customers. Instead they decided to cannibalise the main source of their success: their brilliant open source project.
Now an industry behemoth has decided to directly compete with one of their products. That's tough, especially that it's done in a typically heavy handed way, but... Elastic's reaction seems highly disingenuous, basically a PR dance around "we love open source but we didn't realise it allows competition to eat into our revenue stream".
Elasticsearch is great precisely because it's an open source project, not a product. Otherwise it would be a yet another proprietary black box thingy, with a hefty price tag and a bunch of corporate users. As a project, it thrives, enjoys trust, dedicated community, contributions, enthusiast adoption effect, and so on.
I'm sure they could still make plenty of money from their other products, introduce new ones, maybe even get a huge new stream of support contracts from AWS customers. Instead they decided to cannibalise the main source of their success: their brilliant open source project.