[motorest]

> The original licensing decision was made well before the formation of Elastic the company.

Yes. Those are the terms the software has been distributed with from the inception.

No corporation has the right to pull those rights from end-users, no matter how profitable your shakedown scheme would be.

[jamespo]

Well they obviously do have the rights, are you saying they broke the law?

[motorest]

> Well they obviously do have the rights, are you saying they broke the law?

No, they do not. They can release new versions with some other license if they get all contributors to agree. They absolutely cannot pull the FLOSS licenses from existing releases.

[nirvdrum]

> They can release new versions with some other license if they get all contributors to agree.

Contributors must sign a Contributor License Agreement (CLA) before a contribution will be merged. The CLA signers gave Elastic the right to change licenses, among others, when they signed the agreement. Consequently, Elastic doesn't need to get individual sign-off from each contributor before changing the project license. The code wasn't based on copyleft license, so there's no compulsion to continue using the same licensing terms for all future distributions. That's a motivating factor for many CLAs. If you made a contribution prior to the introduction of the CLA then things get murkier.