Elastic has added another licence to its Elasticsearch and Kibana products that return the platforms to their original open-source roots.
“It is hard to express how happy this statement makes me. Literally jumping up and down with excitement here. All af us at Elastic are,” said Shay Banon, founder and CTO of Elastic in a blog post.
The company is adding the AGPL (GNU Affero General Public License) as an option for those using the software, in addition to the ELv2 (Elastic v2) and SSPL (Server Side Public License). The AGPL returns the projects to the open-source model some three years after the company dropped its use of the Apache 2.0 licence, causing significant bad feeling among the community of developers that had contributed to the project to that point.
The ELv2 prevents companies from taking Elasticsearch and offering it as a commercial SaaS offering – exactly what AWS was attempting to do pre-2021. The Elasticsearch and Kibana applications are also subject to the SSPL, which stipulates that any service management facility for the platform is published.
The SSPL was born of MongoDB’s well-publicised tribulations with AWS, in which the former accused the latter of monetising its database platform without respecting its licensing terms.
The acronym jungle
The theme running through the acronym soup of licensing affecting the use of Elasticsearch and MongoDB is born of the culture clash between the collectivist, free-as-in-freedom software movement that creates the software much of the world runs on, and the realities of the free market. In very simplistic terms, cloud computing operators are wont to take software created by others and charge money to use it, providing the infrastructure, maintenance and necessary security measures needed to run it in production.
When Elastic changed its licence terms in 2021 to prevent what it saw as its exploitation by a powerful cloud company, AWS was forced to fork Elasticsearch and Kibana (that is, copy the code as was) and continue to develop them as a renamed, proprietary offerings under the moniker OpenSearch. Elasticsearch cloud plus Kibana became OpenSearch. That way, it could successfully monetise on the basis of historic work done by Elastic and its large community of unpaid contributors and do so without legal threat. On the flip side of the equation, AWS had to take on the maintenance, upgrade and the continuing development of the search and data dashboard products.
In the company’s blog post, Banon stated, “Amazon is fully invested in their fork, the market confusion has been (mostly) resolved, and our partnership with AWS is stronger than ever.” Elastic’s software can run on GCP, Azure and AWS, whereas companies choosing OpenSearch are clearly locked into the Amazon eco-system. Amazon offers bundles of security and integration features as part of its fees, whereas users of Elasticsearch will likely need to buy similar functionality in, with Elastic being the de facto choice of provider.
OpenSearch has become popular and competes with Elasticsearch for users that need powerful data search and analysis. For existing AWS users, OpenSearch offers the simplest way to integrate these functions into large and complex data sets.
The choices for Elasticsearch in the cloud
Elasticsearch is arguably less subject to vendor lock-in (in so much as any cloud instance can be easily and cheaply moved from provider to provider) and is in the slightly strange position of being an official AWS partner and enjoying AWS’s support. The Elasticsearch cloud can be hosted just about anywhere, therefore.
Of the two platforms, Elasticsearch probably has the greater degree of name recognition, and its new open-source licensing model will give its reputation a much-needed boost, especially among IT professionals, the majority of whom recognise the importance of the open-source and libre models of software.
In anticipation of the community’s responses, Banon’s blog post provides some answers to the likely feedback that will appear in the coming days, including the statement, “We removed a lot of market confusion when we changed our license three years ago…it’s an entirely different landscape now.”
Banon also defened the choice of the AGPL over one of the myriad other free/libre/open licence options, stating, “We chose AGPL because we believe it’s the best way to start to pave a path, with OSI [Open Source Initiative], towards more Open Source in the world, not less.”
Elastic’s user base has grown from 15,000 in April 2021 to over 21,000 according to its latest filing, although its share price suffered at around the time of the AWS fork in 2021, and has not fully recovering since. Banon, however, remains optimistic:
“The stock market will have its ups and downs. What I can assure you, is that we are always thinking long term, and this change is part of it…Elasticsearch is back to being Open Source. Yay! What a wonderful thing to say. What a wonderful day.”
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