> I truly think we couldn't launch something like the email protocol these days and have it gain traction... Sadly it's worse than you expect here. Enter Elas

> I truly think we couldn't launch something like the email protocol these days and have it gain traction... Sadly it's worse than you expect here. Enter ElasticSearch. The company behind the innovation you propose will piggy-back on open source projects (Lucene), add a novelty to it (clustering) and choose a permissive open-source license to encourage contributions. Once hitting a significant market penetration threshold, the project then will move to a mixed-source, enterprise license model with intentionally-crippled community versions (think Neo4j, JFrog, etc). ElasticSearch isn't even alone here, it's just the most obvious example. I've actually been insisting for a long time that we need an Apache-licensed standard solution for clustering generic applications...something useful enough that anyone can connect part A & part B to get "clustered Lucene" instead of "ElasticSearch". Something reasonably deployable (read: is monitorable, has RBAC) without massive licensing costs (read: Neo4j). Not an easy problem, for sure.