> AWS knows that if they take too much of ES' market that they won't survive. If they don't survive it will just be a matter of time before ES is dropped by Amazon and totally unsupported.

Or Amazon (or a third party) may take over maintenance of ES if it's worth it to them. That's the whole point of open source.

> You can frame this question in terms of ethics, you can frame it in terms of licensing naivety, you can frame it in whatever way you want but Amazon is doing what it always has done: exploiting smaller businesses in its goal to become a conglomerate.

There's no exploitation here. ES are grownups and responsible for their own business decisions. Amazon is outcompeting them by providing a better service to their clients.

> Edit: a lot of people talking about the license forget that there's an entire spirit to open source. The permissiveness of open source was one thought to be "we can all succeed together" and what people get upset about is the fact that this obviously violates that spirit. The businesses set up to back companies like Elastic Search were setup to sustain the project while continuing to empower it's creators to take their vision further. If Amazon takes the pie, that doesn't happen. At best, the creators are now Amazon employees and have to follow their desires. Just because you can exploit a license, doesn't mean you should.

The whole point of "open source" as distinct from "free software" was to get away from all the ideological baggage and focus on pragmatic licensing that would appeal to businesses. Guess what: it worked.