I feel so sorry for you guys. You've been totally fucked.

You should have started with the Elastic license and kept it.

Because you switched in 2021, it was too late to stop Amazon and Google from fucking you and stealing your hard work, and even going so far as stealing your name and marketing.

Then the pro-hyperscaler "OSS purists" pulled out their pitchforks and called the Elastic license evil. As fucking if.

It seems plausible the people protesting your Fair Source license work for AWS, have stock in AWS, or just want to cause you grief because they know they have you cornered. They already have an OSI pure version of your product and you're stuck between a rock and a hard place with no real leverage to maximize the return in your core product and labor.

Such a shitty place to be stuck in. That's why other, newer database vendors start as Fair Source from day one. Or just stay entirely proprietary.

Switching back to appease the angry mob happened because too much of the "open source community" doesn't understand how much they're getting fucked over by big tech. They see you guys as the evil ones, which is totally wrong. You're the ones being reverse Robin Hooded.

Why isn't AWS itself open source? It encrusted a lot of OSS infrastructure. Why do they get to steal your product and make more money than your company on your labor? Same with Redis and all the other stuff they stole.

Let me rephrase that - why do they get to directly put their grubby hands into your rightfully earned revenue stream? One which should be yours entirely? Why do they get to suffocate your company's decade plus of hard work and pilfer those cloud revenue streams for themselves?

And all of this is stealing. Because they're wrapping stuff other people and other companies built in a proprietary ecosystem offering meanwhile starving the original authors of oxygen. Just because the letter of the OSI law doesn't say that doesn't mean that isn't exactly what's up. They're the ones who authored the rule book.

This world should be more pro-startup, pro-smaller company. As an ethos and as a means of maximizing return on labor. But the ICs in this space seem to pledge allegiance to the giants that are doing their careers the most harm.

Elastic layoffs happened because Amazon and Google choked you to death. Amazon and Google layoffs happen because they're commoditizing the labor force and using their might to devalue labor.

To everyone else who clings to OSI and open source purism - do you guys know who wrote the OSI and sits on the board? It's literally right in front of your eyes.

Big tech is stealing from you, devaluing your careers, and in the same breath demanding that you license over your labor to them for free. They're killing startups left and right, leaving no oxygen left in the ecosystem, moving into healthy industries and dumping on them in search of endless growth, and they're destroying society (tracking, attestation, age verification, platformization, the algorithm making everyone insane, etc.) to maximize their own profits.

We've got twenty six years of regulatory capture and lax antitrust enforcement to blame for this. They bought the regulators. OSI purism is how they pulled the shroud over your eyes - without paying you - to keep you blind to what an invasive species they have become.