[nenolod]

Amazon's behavior may feel exploitative, but it isn't. That would be like saying Red Hat is exploitative.

Part of the whole concept of free software is that you have freedom of choice with vendors (this is derived from "freedom 0"). Amazon is providing the software and its support as part of the Elasticsearch offering as a managed service. Elastic is a competing vendor, both as a managed service and in a traditional sense too.

Elastic made this decision because they wanted to be the exclusive vendor for Elasticsearch. That's fine, but it's not in the spirit of free software.

If anything, Elastic has exploited the third-party contributors who contributed to Elasticsearch under a CLA by promising to not do what they did and then blaming AWS for doing it anyway.

[cmiles74]

I don't think it's fair to say that Elastic wants to be the exclusive vendor of Elasticsearch. They have registered and own the trademark, I believe it is fair to say that they want to be the only vendor who can use that trademark. I don't think this is uncommon or unreasonable.

Other companies have built products on Elasticsearch (I worked one one myself at one time) and they haven't been sued by Elastic. In my experience, Elastic has behaved in the spirit of free software. Now that their license has changed I would expect they will receive fewer submissions of code from outside companies. In my opinion, the difference here is both scale and misrepresentation of the offering by Amazon through unauthorized use of Elastic's trademarks.

This is not the first company to change their license in order to avoid providing free improvements to Amazon's proprietary services, I believe that this is unique to Amazon, perhaps because of the size of their AWS customer base. I can't find any similar stories of companies changing their licenses because their code was being used by RedHat.

[nenolod]

Trademark disputes are best solved with litigation, not product relicensing.