> If Elastic can offer better service to end-users, their deployment will be more popular and people will prefer their patches; if AWS can offer better service to end-users, their deployment will be more popular.
Not really, because Elastic doesn't get money from people using their free product. So, Elastic could theoretically go bankrupt even while providing an arbitrarily more popular ElasticSearch version.
AWS on the other hand is charging money for using their service, so they only need to compete with Elastic on the hosted version of ES. If their fork of ES is very hard to host on your own, that's a net benefit to AWS, regardless of how easy Elastic's fork is in the same scenarios - neither company is making money off the non-hosted version.
Not really, because Elastic doesn't get money from people using their free product. So, Elastic could theoretically go bankrupt even while providing an arbitrarily more popular ElasticSearch version.
AWS on the other hand is charging money for using their service, so they only need to compete with Elastic on the hosted version of ES. If their fork of ES is very hard to host on your own, that's a net benefit to AWS, regardless of how easy Elastic's fork is in the same scenarios - neither company is making money off the non-hosted version.