That’s what they did with MongoDB at least. Copied the protocol, so that all tools still work, and then closed it off, stopped offering MongoDB cloud services and started their own.

It’s what they did with OpenDistro. If I wanted to use my time on Open Source, why should I choose and fix problems or write new features for OpenDistro over Elasticsearch?

This is going to backfire for Amazon. They are in their good right to fork the Elastic repositories, because the products are Open Source, however, if they want to keep up with new features, they’ll need to constantly rebase against the original repository or have a developing team to only focus on applying changes to their own version of Elasticsearch and Kibana. Their customers might want the Elasticsearch experience and seek documentation on Elasticsearch and not “Amazonsearch”.

No, not at all. I was in a completely different department where we were talking about opening up the product even more. It was closed source while I was there (and still is)