Part of me wonders if AWS always had planned to do this, and they were just waiting until it made business sense to fork (ie they had features and a new direction in mind but neglected to implement them because Elasticsearch was good enough as is). The alternative part is just 2 big corporations not finding a way to get along. Which means without clear direction and careful stewardship I'd expect the forks to just be cleanroom reimplementations or something like that.