Just to add a bit more nuance, I think we tend to focus a lot on community contributions, but IMO the biggest benefit of FOSS is not that; it's adoption.
Even if Elastic writes 100% of the code, by making it open source, they are promoting the widespread adoption of their software. A project with a non-free license or a custom license is a non-starter at many (most?) companies, or at a minimum requires talking to legal which is a PITA.
So, even with no community contributions, Elastic would never have been able to get to where they're at now - making $500MM in revenue a year and at a $15B evaluation - if it weren't open source.
Now just to be clear, Elastic is totally allowed to close things up now that they've reaped the benefits. The beautiful irony is that, when you close source after you've reaped the benefits, by definition you've also hit the point where it's now obviously beneficial for a company like Amazon to make their own fork and keep their AWS Elasticsearch cash cow going.
So, ultimately the community is totally fine. Indeed Elastic has been going down this road for a few years now, so it's actually a good thing for us that this happened. Better to have an amicable divorce early rather than a messy one later. But I can't help but point out that Elastic has broken its promises and misled the community - to their detriment more than to ours.
That is in fact exactly the trap door of open source -- you are QUITE WELCOME to switch to a non-opensource model once you've reaped the benefits, but guess what, anyone else is also QUITE WELCOME to make a still-open-source fork at the point you do that.
This isn't an accident, it's in fact the whole point of open source that people can make open source forks when the original authors decide to no longer do open source.
I don't think there's much 'amicable' about it though in this case at the moment.
Just to add a bit more nuance, I think we tend to focus a lot on community contributions, but IMO the biggest benefit of FOSS is not that; it's adoption.
Even if Elastic writes 100% of the code, by making it open source, they are promoting the widespread adoption of their software. A project with a non-free license or a custom license is a non-starter at many (most?) companies, or at a minimum requires talking to legal which is a PITA.
So, even with no community contributions, Elastic would never have been able to get to where they're at now - making $500MM in revenue a year and at a $15B evaluation - if it weren't open source.
Now just to be clear, Elastic is totally allowed to close things up now that they've reaped the benefits. The beautiful irony is that, when you close source after you've reaped the benefits, by definition you've also hit the point where it's now obviously beneficial for a company like Amazon to make their own fork and keep their AWS Elasticsearch cash cow going.
So, ultimately the community is totally fine. Indeed Elastic has been going down this road for a few years now, so it's actually a good thing for us that this happened. Better to have an amicable divorce early rather than a messy one later. But I can't help but point out that Elastic has broken its promises and misled the community - to their detriment more than to ours.