> ES and other companies have a business that sells a managed version of their product. This is how they sustain developers to continue working on Elastic Search. This model has worked for companies long before cloud providers were a thing. What AWS and others basically did is create identical services, keep all the profits, and exploit gaps in Open Source licensing to this end.

First, Elastic sells a buckload of licenses for on-premises ELK, which is a vastly bigger market than managed services. And second, how is Amazon different from "other companies" you mention? Just because they're bigger and have a ton of experience with managed services they should be forbidden from offering managed ELK?