Comment by jrochkind1

What ES wants of course is for Amazon to give them a cut of revenue from hosting ES.

We already know Amazon isn't interested in doing that (either at all, or at whatever price ES wanted, we don't know that).

They had no legal requirement to when ES was open source. So ES changed the licensing to no longer be open source.

So, Amazon could... a) decide to give ES a cut after all, b) decide to stop hosting ES, or c) fork the last open source version.

I don't think anyone is surprised they chose c? Presumably ES isn't either? Maybe ES thinks this will be good for them/bad for Amazon anyway, because they are hoping potential customers will abandon the Amazon fork and stay on the original ES fork?

Not sure why they'd be confident in that exactly. Maybe they know what they're doing.

As users/customers, we would rather have a choice of hosted vendors/platforms, and that it remain un-forked (so we can use/write software compatible with either vendor/platform). Competition is good for us as users/customers, that's in fact one of the reasons we choose open source, so no one vendor can set the hosting price all on their own without competition. We want to be able to choose among competitors for hosting, based on price, customer service, performance, uptime, whatever.

But ES didn't want that, they didn't want hosting competition to exist -- at least not without permission and agreed upon cut for them -- because, I guess, hosting was how they planned to make money as a company to fund development as well as profits for investors etc. So they changed their license to no longer allow it. So of the possible outcomes remaining... this one seems as good as any for the user/customer, I guess?

So, when you say "I'm doing my part by not building anything with vendor lock-in" -- I'm not sure which course you are suggesting. In fact, between ElasticSearch and new OpenSearch fork.. it's OpenSearch that is the one without vendor lock-in, right? OpenSearch is Apache licensed, and can be hosted by any vendor and still forked by anyone . It's ElasticSearch that has a license limiting what vendors can host it (without permission of ES), it's the one with vendor lock-in, right? So not building anything with vendor lock-in means... ?