I agree. It sucks when some giant company forks your project and gives you nothing. But that's exactly the point of open source licences. If Elastic doesn't like getting their projects forked why did they use Apache 2.0 in the first place ? They could have used a proprietary licence.
Don't forget that ElasticSearch is built on Lucene (which is the core of their search engine) and is an Apache 2 Open Source project which existed long before ElasticSearch. So they benefited tremendously from the work of thousands of Engineers too.
Then choose a proprietary licence. Enterprise customers will not be afraid to touch your code and nobody will be able to fork it without your permission.
Then it is hard to get initial customers to build a healthy user base and compete with close source competitors. After all if I am paying upfront I would expect a very different user experience, and more entitled to demand more.
Open source just scales better in that regard. It is low barrier, low maintainence, and self organized. Had it be proprietary Elasticsearch will never see the day of going public.
So open source is how it initially comes to being, then they find there is commercial opportunity in it, and for a long time, those objectives can coexist.
But open source is open source. I don't think it guarantees you can make money of it. You are open sourcing your code, then accusing other parties for using it under the license permission, is ... contradictary. There is after all, an element of freedom in the open source dogma since its founding, be it this free or that free.
I am not a fan of SV vulture capital approach of building commercial for profitable companies around established open source projects. They are not doing anything different than Amazon in my opinion. If more and more essential features are moving to closed source land, then the open source is broken way before Amazon took over.
So let money do money's stuff, and open source be open source. It has a definition anyway, if that what that code is permitted to be used, so be it.
I have personal repos that has thousands of stars. I thought for a very short period of time, had I not open source it might give me additional several grand of income, after all there are several companies contact me. But I know it is too late to think that way, I already enjoy all the attention can exposure by open sourcing it, now I wish I can eat the cake and have it? That is no magic open source could offer.
