They are brave regardless. Elastic is not only database engine but whole ecosystem. Drivers, tooling, existing code, data pipelines, documentation and tutorials. Long terms keeping with elastic will be challenging to say at least.
Take postgres. RDS is a core AWS product. They absolutely rely on it. But if you take a look at https://www.postgresql.org/community/contributors/, are any of the current major contributors at AWS? If they are, I can't see them.
It's okay to behave like that when you're a small or even medium sized tech company. But when you're the world's number one cloud service, by quite some margin? Hmmn.
If you don't agree with the spirit of the Apache license terms, that's fine. You can draft an Apache-for-everyone-except-AWS license and lobby for its use by others.
Edit: I am much more talking about projects like Postgres than companies like Elastic.
I'm not gatekeeping what "real contributions" are: You can fund development of OSS, you can provide Project Manager support, you can publicize and organize events (for the sake of the tech; not sales), do DevRel for something, provide UX/UXR/design support etc. They're all real contributions.
But for some reason, AWS contributions to 3rd party OSS projects stops right at "it works fine on AWS". It's kind of a meme at this point.
Disclaimer: I work at GCP on Kubernetes/OSS.
I cannot dispute the fact that Google has more developers working on k8s than AWS does. And that AWS developers have been focused more on making sure that k8s works great on AWS, rather than the core code. I've heard folks say that they think that k8s works better on Google because of all the Google developers using it. And that might have been true at some point. But, in any case, that means that you're probably going to see more activity making k8s work well on AWS than work in other areas.
But it doesn't mean that other "3rd party" packages don't see more general activity that goes beyond "it works fine on AWS". Like the work in the upstream Linux kernel to apply the retpoline approach (invented by folks at Google, but not applied to upstream Linux) to mitigate Spectre. [1]
It is meme when people pick it up and propagate it.
[1] https://www.slideshare.net/ennael/kernel-recipes-2018-mitiga...
I can still spin ElasticSearch cluster for my backend and I have somehow open license. Where is open source version of Aurora, Dynamo, DocumentDB, Neptune or Redshift? Where is anything OSS from AWS that is useful outside interfacing with AWS services?
Is it though? Every single one of their blog posts have been focused on spinning their decision as being great for the open source community. What they should have said was - we are a business, have VCs/shareholders and need to make money now, so sorry but the free ride is over.
AWS say they want elasticsearch and kibana to be open source. What they really mean is they want to use elasticsearch without paying their fair share.