[TAForObvReasons]

The maintainers of the project chose to implement this change. You may not like it, and you are free to make a fork compatible with the original apache 2.0 license, but it is well within Elastic's right to add this. This is the danger with corporate open source in general.

Facebook made a similar unilateral decision in relicensing React from Apache 2 to "BSD + Patents" many years ago. They faced quite a bit of pressure, resulting in another relicensing to MIT.

[lolinder]

They have the right to do so, but that doesn't change the fact that it's a bad idea politically. It comes off as Elastic prioritizing their war with Amazon over the community, leaving room for Amazon to continue to position themselves as the community's ally.

[altdataseller]

At the end of the day, CTOs and decision makers in corporations don't go with the company that position themselves as "allies". They go with the company that is shipping important new features, with better support and resiliency. If Elastic is shipping features faster than AWS is, then they'll go with Elastic. I bet most CTOs aren't even aware of the politics happening - it's only the echo chamber in Hacker News that is making a big deal of this.

[ckdarby]

Doesn't really matter, at most companies +150 employees CTOs are abstracted from making those decisions. It'll be senior level individual contributors that make the case across the org to other ICs.

At that level we're very much aware of the current situation. On a personal level the moment Elastic announced their changes I dropped all support for them moving forward.

They got out done on their own product. Elastic cloud had little value add and once managed ES came along it became pointless to use their cloud.

[dragonwriter]

> They go with the company

...that is the bigger name and perceived as lower risk, better enterprise support, and fits with less internal work in their broader strategy even if that means sacrificing feature speed.

I mean, at least, most of the established market, rather than startups burning through VC dollars. But even the latter is likely to do one stop shopping with a big cloud vendor like Amazon unless particular features of an alternative are key to their business.

[altdataseller]

Indeed, that’s why Elastic has their own cloud service that you can host in AWS.

[geofft]

No one is disputing it's within their rights. It's within their rights to add a feature to the library that blasts "Caramelldansen" through the nearest Chromecast device when you import it, too.

What they're saying is that this is a breach of community norms.