Here we have a company that is simply opening up visibility of the code of their commercial offering, which will enhance customer relationships vs. keeping the code black box —— and it's observed as user-hostile?

Open core isn't evil. Companies need to make money, and shouldn't have to choose between fully-open-source vs. closed-source.

Fully-open-source companies have a really hard time of building a good company, because despite the great work they put out into the world, other enterprising cloud companies can build closed-source cloud services around it. For example, I've paid Compose.io and other companies real money around MongoDB, and never a cent to MongoDB the company. Same goes w/ Docker, who has struggled to build a great business because they open-sourced so much of their value.

So yeah, Elastic is trying to make it more likely that you'll choose to buy a license, because the health of their business depends on getting paid customers.