>The problem was that AWS is better at acquiring customers for their competing hosting service.
I would actually take this a step further and say the problem was that Elastic apparently never had no plan for how to deal with Amazon. If hosting is ever on the table, this has to be part of the plan from the beginning. For every customer that says "your hosted solution won't work for us, we're thinking about deploying on AWS" they have to be able to translate that into profit. This seems like a lose-lose for Elastic as they have effectively ceded all that away to this fork. The use of SSPL also seems like nonsense here that won't result in them seeing a dime from Amazon.
Seems sad to be them but this has always been the case with open source. There has been countless successful businesses established that run with on source software (think Linux, glibc, etc) and almost none of them payed back open source developers or contributed anything.
To say that developers/authors of open-source believe that if their projects get picked up by some big company they would also be payed seems silly and childish. This has never been the case, why would they even believe that? It was rare when a company payed open source devs for their work (and it made the news, like when RedHat gifted Torvalds a lot of stock before going public and it's not like Torvalds was the only kernel dev at that time).
I would actually take this a step further and say the problem was that Elastic apparently never had no plan for how to deal with Amazon. If hosting is ever on the table, this has to be part of the plan from the beginning. For every customer that says "your hosted solution won't work for us, we're thinking about deploying on AWS" they have to be able to translate that into profit. This seems like a lose-lose for Elastic as they have effectively ceded all that away to this fork. The use of SSPL also seems like nonsense here that won't result in them seeing a dime from Amazon.