You are right: none of it was foreseeable, but rather, an expected outcome.
In case of success, which Elastic has certainly achieved with ElasticSearch, it is fully expected that other companies will jump in on the bandwagon and try to profit off of it too! And as a company, you hope for success, or rather, that to play out, but just that you'd be the go-to for earning the most off the product you created. While not foreseeable, it is not unexpected that you might not be the one to profit most from your product, and you should plan to profit enough! Where it gets complicated is that nobody expects to earn orders of magnitude less from a product they created than others relying on it.
What they did not foresee was that one of those companies would be The Cloud Provider, thus minimizing their value proposition since Amazon can throw significant resources at it, possibly even greater than Elastic themselves. One could argue that Amazon abused their monopolistic position in cloud providing to offer a bundled ElasticSearch experience that Elastic could never compete with. Even if they developed an alternative in-house product, it looks exactly the same as Microsoft bundling Internet Explorer with Windows back in the day.
Even today, if you are willing to develop an open source or free software product, if you get successful enough, you are likely to be an exploitation target of a megacorp. Companies always have an option to relicense in-house written code, and any code submitted by signatories of an appropriate contributor license agreement (CLA).
Basically, I agree it wasn't nice of Amazon, and that it wasn't foreseeable, but it ultimately wasn't unexpected either. To me, this is monopolistic behaviour that should be treated as such.
This also raises another interesting question: if AGPL is an appropriate solution, why did Elastic not relicense under it today? (I am sure they answered this very question when they published their original license, so it's mostly rethorical)
> Where it gets complicated is that nobody expects to earn orders of magnitude less from a product they created than others relying on it.
And this is where the problem basically is. The core philosophy of open source licensing is that the creators who use it don't particularly care beyond compliance with the terms of the licenses (eg. Source distribution for copy left licenses)
If it turns out you *do* in fact care, then Open Source licenses are not a good fit for you. If you still go ahead release under Open Source and then change later, don't be surprised to be called out for bait and switch manipulation.
In case of success, which Elastic has certainly achieved with ElasticSearch, it is fully expected that other companies will jump in on the bandwagon and try to profit off of it too! And as a company, you hope for success, or rather, that to play out, but just that you'd be the go-to for earning the most off the product you created. While not foreseeable, it is not unexpected that you might not be the one to profit most from your product, and you should plan to profit enough! Where it gets complicated is that nobody expects to earn orders of magnitude less from a product they created than others relying on it.
What they did not foresee was that one of those companies would be The Cloud Provider, thus minimizing their value proposition since Amazon can throw significant resources at it, possibly even greater than Elastic themselves. One could argue that Amazon abused their monopolistic position in cloud providing to offer a bundled ElasticSearch experience that Elastic could never compete with. Even if they developed an alternative in-house product, it looks exactly the same as Microsoft bundling Internet Explorer with Windows back in the day.
Even today, if you are willing to develop an open source or free software product, if you get successful enough, you are likely to be an exploitation target of a megacorp. Companies always have an option to relicense in-house written code, and any code submitted by signatories of an appropriate contributor license agreement (CLA).
Basically, I agree it wasn't nice of Amazon, and that it wasn't foreseeable, but it ultimately wasn't unexpected either. To me, this is monopolistic behaviour that should be treated as such.
This also raises another interesting question: if AGPL is an appropriate solution, why did Elastic not relicense under it today? (I am sure they answered this very question when they published their original license, so it's mostly rethorical)