In reply to ripul.

I don’t think attribution it’s a purely “moral” question: most licenses explicitly state that authorship must be recognized. As I understand, you must be the copyright holder to license software, which means authorship attribution it’s a requisite.
It’s quite a bold statement to say that “a huge majority of wp.org plugins have copied code from non-open source codes”; I would be really interested in any proof for this, since it could be a huge liability for using any plugin from the directory. I hope we could get some clarification on this.
I think it’s not realistic to expect that Elastic should just be glad to be recognized by AWS because they’re a larger company. According to Elastic, Amazon violated their trademark (which has no relation to whatever license they use). Also, Amazon said that they were collaborating with Elastic for their own offering, which was false. OTOH, while it’s true that AWS it’s huge, Elastic it’s not exactly a small player either: they reported over 420 million in revenue on 2020, so it’s not that they should be grateful for the publicity alone.

This is more of a confrontation between giants, where users are probably not going to get any benefit: there’s a risk that the Amazon fork won’t get any significant updates (let’s be honest, they just created their fork to keep selling their service, not because of some altruistic inspiration) but also that the Elastic version will switch to even more restrictive terms.

Elastic could have chosen the AGPL, which it’s recognized by the OSI, it would have balanced their concerns about the use of their software, and helped to keep a healthy and unified community around their product. Instead, we are just stuck in the middle of a business battle and with two bad alternatives.