Another angle: Elasti Co gives away their IP presumably as a marketing ploy to get adoption and lock in. AWS comes along and uses free software to build a platf

Another angle: Elasti Co gives away their IP presumably as a marketing ploy to get adoption and lock in. AWS comes along and uses free software to build a platform users want. Elasti Co gets mad they aren't in full control of the software they gave away and now want to control its usage Some other thoughts Where do you draw the line between "cloud", consulting, and just hiring your own engineers to run it. One is fully outsourced and one insourced but the result is the same (someone is managing an Elasticsearch cluster and making money doing it) It's in Amazon's interest to contribute some of their changes back or they end up with an incompatible product that becomes a less attractive "Elasticsearch" alternative.