At the end of the day, all this really demonstrates is that the business model of producing open source software for free and charging for support or hosted solutions either does not work or does not scale. Part of the point of open source software is that anyone who uses it can inspect the source and make changes. If your business model depends on users not providing their own services for the software you have developed, that is on you.
This is also why, if you have a customer or competitor who makes changes to the software and does not release those changes if they convey the software to others, you are not protected by using a permissive open source license. If AWS was allegedly not committing back to Elasticsearch/Kibana, they are within their rights to do so, whether Elastic like it or not. Elastic should not have used a permissive open source license like APL. The only thing that protects users here is strong copyleft, in this case a license like AGPL.
At the end of the day, these licenses protect users. Maybe something else is needed to protect the interests of businesses which also respecting users - whatever that is, it is not necessarily one of the stated goals of free or open source software, so assigning an open source license and expecting support to cover the costs is not going to end well for you if you get big enough to matter.
This is also why, if you have a customer or competitor who makes changes to the software and does not release those changes if they convey the software to others, you are not protected by using a permissive open source license. If AWS was allegedly not committing back to Elasticsearch/Kibana, they are within their rights to do so, whether Elastic like it or not. Elastic should not have used a permissive open source license like APL. The only thing that protects users here is strong copyleft, in this case a license like AGPL.
At the end of the day, these licenses protect users. Maybe something else is needed to protect the interests of businesses which also respecting users - whatever that is, it is not necessarily one of the stated goals of free or open source software, so assigning an open source license and expecting support to cover the costs is not going to end well for you if you get big enough to matter.