Elastic's business model is "make + distribute ElasticSearch for free, then offer hosted ES for money." AWS (among others) offers hosted ElasticSearch as well - Elastic feels this isn't fair, variously because: AWS may have violated trademark by calling theirs "Amazon Elasticsearch Service", or because AWS doesn't contribute enough to the open source development of ElasticSearch, or one of a few other grievances. So they're changing their license to one that protects against this sort of "abuse" of the Apache license.
The less charitable version is that since Elastic's business model revolves around selling hosted ElasticSearch and AWS is outcompeting them there, they're switching to an "Open Source, but you're not allowed to do that anymore" license. But because Elastic values the goodwill they get from being "open source," they're trying to convince the world that this is a principled, moral stance instead of a run-of-the-mill self-interested decision to make their business more viable.
Elastic's business model is "make + distribute ElasticSearch for free, then offer hosted ES for money." AWS (among others) offers hosted ElasticSearch as well - Elastic feels this isn't fair, variously because: AWS may have violated trademark by calling theirs "Amazon Elasticsearch Service", or because AWS doesn't contribute enough to the open source development of ElasticSearch, or one of a few other grievances. So they're changing their license to one that protects against this sort of "abuse" of the Apache license.
The less charitable version is that since Elastic's business model revolves around selling hosted ElasticSearch and AWS is outcompeting them there, they're switching to an "Open Source, but you're not allowed to do that anymore" license. But because Elastic values the goodwill they get from being "open source," they're trying to convince the world that this is a principled, moral stance instead of a run-of-the-mill self-interested decision to make their business more viable.