[PaulHoule]

Is it the open source project Elasticsearch that you're worried about or the company?

For a long time I've been shocked about the large amount of venture money that goes to companies that are involved with trendy open source projects that just don't have a moat.

For instance I've heavily used Elasticsearch as have many other without ever paying money to Elasticsearch the company. Similarly, companies like Pivotal, Cloudera, Hortonworks, Continuum Analytics, etc. just seem to be a scam. So long as they are trendy some companies will think that they have to pay them money, until they realize that they don't.

[danielblazevski]

I would say both the company and the project. They seem to go hand-in-hand.

Their business model is to allow free access to a limited version of their product -- which admittedly is good enough for many to use in production.

And if these companies stop getting revenue for the premium product, then I worry it's goodbye to substantial progress on open source version.