The race to replace Redis

> I still remember ElasticSearch's lead going mental (as in "really upset and distressed") with how their open-ass licensing was supposed to bring in more contributions and yet only allowed Amazon to get fatter by selling their OSS.

Amazon isn't "selling [ElasticSearch's] OSS" -- It is "selling a service built using ElasticSearch's OSS". That's a _crucial_ difference.

At the end of the day, the _software_ is in of itself irrelevant; what matters is the _services_ the software can be used to provide. When it comes to providing services, it's pretty much impossible to compete with the giant players' scale [1]. Especially when those giant players are (more often than not) deriving the majority of their income from datamining users of those services, an approach that is only feasible once you get to a certain size.

[1] Unlike software that is "one-and-done" with a marginal reproduction cost of effectively zero, providing services has an incremental per-use[r] cost (bandwidth, compute, storage; plus the ongoing infrastructure/management cost of robustly scaling).