Thank you for sharing your concerns. Open, transparent communication (where possible) is a core tenet of the project and Elastic as an organization.
Put simply, joining forces with the Swiftype team has no bearing on our position regarding open source, its import, or the way in which we build Elasticsearch, Kibana, Logstash, Beats, etc.
In fact, this is a similar concern as was expressed when we first announced the set of features that make up X-Pack. The fact that we built and offer security as a commercial feature has not prevented others from doing so, and that is part of the beauty of an ecosystem around an open source offering. This concern came up more recently, when we acquired Opbeat for APM. Like Swiftype, they were a SaaS company and we’ve open sourced the agents, server, and worked to enable users to get all the capabilities of Elasticsearch and Kibana. (It’s an aside, but you can learn more in the APM alpha blog post).
Or, consider the process of ingesting data into Elasticsearch. Yes, we create Logstash and Beats (and there are some ‘closed source’ features) but this hasn’t prevented others from building tools to ship data to ES. We didn’t steal features that enable ingestion into Elasticsearch and lock them down to only our offerings.
Elasticsearch, as an open source product, will continue to be core to our business and development — we have no plans to reduce investment, and many plans to continue optimizing and adding appropriate features. It is in our best interest to ensure the most useful products possible, available for the entirety of our community. This is the core of our business...someone downloads the Elastic Stack and is able to solve problems quickly. Keep in mind that we now (with Swiftype) offer a SaaS search solution (for site or enterprise search) and this is a different kind of user, kind of customer than those who may download and configure portions of the Elastic Stack on their own.
When it comes to 'end-to-end' offerings or 'solutions' it makes sense — in some cases — for them to be packaged and sold so that we can continue to innovate.
Imagine a search feature. If we limit its reach (when applicable to a broad base of users), then we do our users a disservice.
Swiftype is a cloud-based search platform that lets you add the power of Elasticsearch to your workflow quickly. Elasticsearch powers that workflow and we must, and will, continue to invest and innovate in the core.
And yes, I acknowledge that I am asking you to trust us. But I do believe that we have done a good job (there is always room to improve) at fostering an ecosystem around our open source offerings. If we fail in this area...we fail in the long-term.