Actually, your argument that there’s any relevance to Elastic being the primary developer lacks insight. It changes nothing about the licensing situation nor about the ethics. You’re also not factoring in the fact that the nonrestrictive license is why Elasticsearch became the standard.
You also haven’t resolved the logical contradiction that Elastic is equally “guilty” of profiting off of Lucene.
I honestly don’t think a nuanced understanding of these licenses and open source business models can lead to any conclusion except this one: Amazon is not in the wrong here, Elastic is being entitled, misleading and duplicitous. Elastic is free to use Lucene as its kernel and monetize it, and Amazon is free to offer a managed Elasticsearch service.
If you write Apache 2.0 software, you have no right to bitch about competition. That’s the short of it. And remember - Elastic is doing fine. They’re worth $15B. The founder has hundreds of millions of dollars now, and rightly so.
Right. So what would Linux look like if it was developed by a single company?
One of the reasons to choose open source is to avoid lock in by having multiple suppliers, and at least in theory have some healthy competition between them.
They don't seem to have any revenue sharing scheme with Linus, yet all the Linux companies seem to be doing pretty well for themselves.