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Exactly, what's with all the work that is behind Apache Lucene that's running under the covers of ElasticSearch. All of these people [1] would also never see a dime from elastic.co either. So you can spin the wheel the other way around and say they are monetizing other peoples free work as well.

[1] http://lucene.apache.org/whoweare.html

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A lot of those people are Elastic and LucidWorks employees who are monetizing their contributions to Lucene through their companies' respective products. I'm sure there are others there, too, but those were the obvious ones.

LucidWorks is not Elastic. So Elastic is benefiting from the work done by another company, without paying anything to it. Or am I missing something?

My point is that many of the contributors to Lucene are motivated by the benefit it provides to their own companies and are paid to make those contributions as part of their job. Their contributions also benefit anyone else who chooses to use Lucene including large corporate entities such as Apple, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Akamai even those companies contribute little or nothing to Lucene. In other words, on the spectrum of people who are "monetizing" Lucene, Elastic and LucidWorks contribute far more than others and are called out about it only because their products are externally distributed and visibly leverage Lucene.

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