[inapis]

This is disingenuous. Yes elastic cloned an open source project and improved it in some measure but also made the access free for a decent chunk of the features. Most of what is under the paid license in the elastic stack has less to do with lucene itself and more to do with quality of life improvements in deployment, security, analysis etc. There are enough improvements over and above the lucene project to make elastic worthwhile in itself.

OTOH, AWS pretty much xeroxed the elastic stack and added a paywall (at least after a year). Compared to that you still get immense value out of the elastic stack for free.

[cthalupa]

How has AWS added a paywall? They charged you for hosting ElasticSearch on their infrastructure and their management, yet there was no difference in the software.

When they decided to implement features that were only available in the proprietary version of ElasticSearch, they open sourced it.

Charging for infrastructure and management of said infrastructure is not the same as placing a paywall on software.