Your argument that Elastic could have released ES closed source and did us a favor is not a valid one. They released ES open source so that they could leverage

Your argument that Elastic could have released ES closed source and did us a favor is not a valid one. They released ES open source so that they could leverage the community + an open source tool (lucene) to build their tool and later on their company. If not for the open source they would be just a random actor in search and SOLR would likely be a better tool than it is now. Also by your logic elastic did to lucene what aws did to elastic...