[teruakohatu]

> Elastic made the mistake of building a whole business on open source software by relying on the poor experience and artificial overhead to launching that software independently and in a production ready fashion

It's a billion dollar business. I don't think they have made any mistakes, until now at least. They are very successful.

They are portraying themselves as a small indie dev up against a titan, but with over $400 million in revenue last year they are no small fish.

[kotxig]

Yes they have been successful and continue to be. I still think they have made a mistake, I don't see why success would invalidate that. If amazon are eating into their profits their mistake was to not protect their business against that threat from the beginning. The mistake cost them whichever rewards amazon are reaping. That doesn't mean they have failed entirely, and clearly far from it.

[teruakohatu]

> The mistake cost them whichever rewards amazon are reaping

I disagree because if they had had it closed or non-free open source from the start, they would not have a $15 billion business. Partly because people wouldn't have adopted it, and partly because it is build on other open source projects (Lucene).

I don't think there is a scenario where they get their cake (an open source project and a vastly successful business) and get to eat it too (they have no competition).