Well, I don't believe copyright actually protects the first company to successfully implement an idea. In the instance of cars, the goal is to have self-driving cars. Some people think LIDAR is necessary, Tesla doesn't. There are often many solutions to the same problem.
In the case of Elastic, we instead could just have services SaaS services where the source code is protected behind an API like Algolia Search instead. I realize Elastic did FOSS partially for marketing purposes, but I don't see how Amazon lifting Elastic's IP and wrapping behind a service is beneficial in the long run. It might be better, cheaper and faster today, but when Elastic goes out of business, Amazon likely would not put the same type of effort into future development and new features IMO. I do think this is different than Google, Oracle and Java. In that circumstance, Google wrote its own source code using Java versus extending Java and offering at as a "new" language. This is more closely akin to Uber leveraging Google Maps when it started.
In the case of Elastic, we instead could just have services SaaS services where the source code is protected behind an API like Algolia Search instead. I realize Elastic did FOSS partially for marketing purposes, but I don't see how Amazon lifting Elastic's IP and wrapping behind a service is beneficial in the long run. It might be better, cheaper and faster today, but when Elastic goes out of business, Amazon likely would not put the same type of effort into future development and new features IMO. I do think this is different than Google, Oracle and Java. In that circumstance, Google wrote its own source code using Java versus extending Java and offering at as a "new" language. This is more closely akin to Uber leveraging Google Maps when it started.