WDYT:
Would it have been better for AWS to initiate Open Distro for ES as part of e.g. Apache Software Foundation, whose mantra is "community over code"?
(or if not ASF for some reason, then Eclipse or CNCF for example)
Yes, and I think they should have done so, just look at the responses in this thread. It's just been launched and everybody is afraid of Amazon vendor lock-in. For many techies, just the Amazon name is scary even though this is Apache 2.0 licensed.