Amazon Web Services (AWS)[1] just launched Open Distro for Elasticsearch[2]. This program takes AWS's recent proprietary additions to Elasticsearch and open sources them under the Apache 2.0 license. That sounds good.
Shay Banon, co-founder of Elasticsearch[3] and CEO of Elastic, its parent company, sees Amazon as forking and redistributing rebundled Elasticsearch for its own purposes: "From various vendors, to large Chinese entities, to now, Amazon. There was always a 'reason,' at times masked with fake altruism or benevolence" for "open-sourcing" their own Elasticsearch forks.
AWS claims this isn't so. "AWS. Open Distro for Elasticsearch leverages the open source code for Elasticsearch and Kibana. This is not a fork; we will continue to send our contributions and patches upstream to advance these projects," wrote Jeff Barr, AWS Chief Evangelist.
AWS VP of Cloud Architecture Strategy Adrian Cockcroft claimed: "When AWS launches a service based on an open-source project, we are making a long-term commitment[4] to support our customers. We contribute bug fixes, security, scalability, performance, and feature enhancements back to the community. For example, we have been a significant contributor to Apache Lucene[5], which powers Amazon Elasticsearch Service."
That's not how others see it. AWS has been getting hammered recently for being an open-source user, which doesn't give back to the open-source communities. Open-source companies such as MariaDB[6], Redis[7], and MongoDB[8] have all accused AWS, such as MariaDB