I felt like that was implied by the usage of AGPL: if Amazon wanted to start using this and apply patches on top of it, the AGPL would require that they share those patches with their customers, which would allow Elastic to integrate them into main again.
I don't think that's their intention. Elastic wouldn't be able to integrate Amazon's patches back into their codebase without losing the ability to change the license in the future. Even more, since it's AGPL, they'd have to get rid of their other licenses immediately.
> Elastic wouldn't be able to integrate Amazon's patches back into their codebase without losing the ability to change the license in the future.
(I anal, even if I were a lawyer, I am definitely not YOUR lawyer, yada yada)
If I were Elastic, I would require Amazon dot com or anyone else who wants to contribute code to Elastic to sign a CLA. Depending on how the CLA is structured, this could allow Elastic to continue multi licensing?
In this scenario, Amazon doesn't want to contribute to Elastic, Elastic wants Amazon's changes from Amazon's fork (Opensearch). So they can't demand Amazon sign a CLA, because they can't offer Amazon anything for it. Amazon is fine just ... not signing and continuing on their open fork.
Elastic have lost the Schelling monopoly on what constitutes the "mainline".
But Elastic can already take the changes from Amazons fork - opensearch is permissively licensed. What they might want is that Amazon stops maintaining its fork and contributes directly to elastics mainline. I believe that ship has sailed, and it's not coming back to pick up stragglers.
