I'm a long time Elasticsearch user (from before 1.0). I've also used Solr and I've built some lucene based search solutions before that as early as 2003. I'm also a customer of their hosted elastic cloud and I know several people inside that company; both former colleagues and through meetups. They do awesome stuff technically and it's a great product to use.

In short, I think Amazon doing this is a good thing. I've had the pleasure of using their hosted solution and I can't recommend it with a straight face. Key management features in the API are blocked and upgrades are a pain in the ass (as in, not supported). Support and documentation is minimal. It's not terrible but you get a much better bang for buck by using Elastic cloud. Self hosting is not something I recommend you do until you need to. It's a PITA and requires a non trivial amount of devops by someone who knows what they are doing to do it right. Rarely worth the price and hassle unless you need to run this at petabyte scale on custom hardware.

First, lets look at what this is not. This is not a fork of Elasticsearch or Kibana. If you go to the github account associated with this website, you'll see that this is simply Amazon publishing the source of plugins they use in their hosted solutions. The readme of those plugins basically instructs you to download the appropriate version of Elasticsearch from Elastic.

Second, I was there when Shay Banon announced the licensing changes at Elastic ON in early 2018. At the time I already thought this was a somewhat unfortunate move as it muddles the water in terms what is and isn't open source. Technically what they announced was shared source for things that were previously closed source. Which is better than nothing but not ideal. The whole thing was designed to get more people to try this out than was the case when you needed to get a license before you could play with it. It's basically a form of shareware.

We use Elastic Cloud, it seems all the cool stuff they talk about is mostly off limits to their basic tier users astill nd requires quite a bit of skill to get started with. I appreciate that they are trying to upsell this stuff but I seem to be doing fine with just the standard OSS features (and I know they are OSS because this is what I used before elastic cloud as well). I could switch back to self hosted and not lose much (other than convenience).

Third, I think the Elasticsearch ecosystem benefits from having outside contributors; especially from big corporate entities like Amazon. Their history is literally bootstrapping off Apache Lucene as a small group of developers and consultants. They employ core committers and one of the co-founders is a core committer as well (I worked with him before Elastic happened). They've been working together with the Solr people on improving Lucene for the past six years and have made some awesome improvements. Lucene sees regular contributions from academics as well. It's a healthy project and it is core to what Elasticsearch does. IMHO this is something they need to nurture and keep and something that is core to their culture.

The plugin ecosystem around Elasticsearch is where the action is commercially. They've built a lot of cool stuff around Elasticsearch that adds a lot of value. That too sees a lot of outside innovation. So, Amazon publishing some plugins is great. Also, given that they use it at scale, they probably have a thing or two to say about how to improve Elasticsearch and probably should be regularly creating pull requests, creating issues, etc. That's a good thing. Anything blocking that would be a bad thing

In short, Elasticsearch created a big mess by mixing open and closed source and people are working around them. Instead of fighting that, they should double down of being open source at their core and benefit from this rather than attempting to fight it. I'd recommend them to 1) re-create and market their community edition, 2) actively considering offering support for Amazon customers and other people using their technology but outside of their bubble (e.g. Graylog). Work with the community instead of against it. Everybody wins.