I am not sure what triggered this particular response from Elastic laden with references to Kendrick Lamar's discography, but it is embarrassing and unbecoming of a corporate blog post. It also feels especially disrespectful to Lamar to use his music in this way, but whatever floats your boat I guess.

Elastic's software rightfully belongs to its unpaid volunteer contributors. You cannot just give a huge middle finger to your open source contributors and then expect them to all come back to you when you want. Trust and respect are earned, not given, and Elastic irreparably destroyed its bond with its community of contributors.

Elastic is not the only company trying this move as of recently—though I did not write about it at the time, I was very aware of what was happening to the Redis project. Projects that fork major open source projects after the business walks away from open source would do well to completely remove the CLA requirement for their code and only require something like the Developer Certificate of Origin.

Fortunately, it seems the Linux Foundation has taken this to heart, and the open-source spirit of the Redis community will live on in Valkey.