I highly doubt elastic intended to offer it for free to the cloud providers from the start. They wanted to offer it for free to end users. This is why I expect new products will now start with these more restrictive licenses.
This is a classic case of trying to put the genie back in the bottle.
Edit: I want e2e encryption but not censorship resistant, not when it starts getting used for inciting to violence. Search for eg "WhatsApp lynch mobs" or "Facebook Myanmar genocide".
NLP locally in the phone -- an AI that slightly understand what the user writes -- and if it's (I'm oversimplifying) like "kill all ...", then the AI bricks the phone.
Otherwise it's e2e as usual.
(But I guess I'd taken Elastic's approach and switched to SSPL)
About 2: i replied here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25798359
So to later turn around and say "hey we never envisioned Amazon et all turning around and selling Elasticsearch as a service" is looking at it backwards. When you release something under Apache 2 (or a similar non-restrictive license) you're intentionally telling people to do what they want with it.
Anyway, my thoughts on these kinds of situations is that it usually implies there's some disconnect between how Elastic Co wants to make money versus how they actually are making money.
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There's a related issue of open source maintainers/devs feeling "exploited". Now while having users submitting issues with unfortunate tone/wording that implies that you're obligated as the maintainer to spend your time fixing their issues is frustrating, it's also part of the game. I'm getting really frustrated with the whole "it's not fair that company X is using my free software without contributing back". That's literally what you agreed to have happen when you released under a non-restrictive license!
If you want a restrictive license, that's fine, but don't release under Apache 2 or BSD and then turn around and act shocked when people use your free software for free. It is unreasonable to put something out there for free and then suddenly expect money for it. That doesn't mean that companies shouldn't be contributing back to software they rely on - that's a no-brainer as far as I'm concerned - but it does mean that nobody should be surprised when someone does choose to "consume" software without contributing back.
Elastic are of course entirely entitled to change the license to whatever they feel like, including closing the source entirely for future development. But they made the choice at an earlier stage to release the code under a permissive licence - that was a choice to allow others to do what they want with the software, not just “what you want so long as it doesn’t infringe on our business model”. They are free to change their mind on that, but it’s not like it’s an unexpected, unfair, or unpredictable outcome.
Linux, GNU, Apache, Perl, Python, PHP, Rails, WordPress, and many many more projects at least as important and complex as Elasticsearch. We don't hear Linus or Stallman, or Larry or Guido or Rasmus or DHH or Mullenweg complaining about hosting companies profiting off their work.
I get that newer projects are structured differently, and that companies like Redis Labs and Mongo and Elastic are paying salaries to engineers to develop their software - which is _way_ different to the examples I cited above. But just because they've chosen that, doesn't mean they're "right" or entitled to succeed working that way. The optimist in me hopes some of them will, and perhaps this will be a route to the world getting "open source" software written that the old Apache project's model perhaps could never have achieved. I certainly don't think that's a given though.
The pessimist in me feels bait-n-switched, and is wondering how to plan on staying on 7.10 safely and keeping an eye out to see who's gonna fork it and at least keep up security work on it under Apache 2.0 moving forward. We don't "sell Elasticsearch as a service", but we use it enough that I don't want to ask for legal budget to mitigate the risk of upgrading away from the Apache 2.0 licensed version. I don't trust SSPL enough to want use anything licensed that way, and I doubt I'll be very happy with Elastic License either if I spend enough time to read/understand it properly...
I wonder how many companies would be willing to pay $100 a month for their elastic search to continue to receive security updates... in theory the right individual could make a decent living simply forking the various OSS projects that have since gone noSS, applying security fixes, and collecting money from the companies build on them.