Elastic founder on returning to open source four years after going proprietary
Licensing kerfuffles have long been a defining facet of the commercial open source space. Some of the biggest vendors have switched to a more restrictive “copyleft” license, as Grafana and Element have done, or gone full proprietary, as HashiCorp did last year with Terraform.
Elastic, the creator of enterprise search and data retrieval engine Elasticsearch and the Kibana visualization dashboard, threw a surprise curveball last month when it revealed it was going open source once more — nearly four years after switching to a couple of proprietary “source available” licenses. The move goes against a grain that has seen countless companies ditch open source altogether. Some are even creating a whole new licensing paradigm, as we’re seeing with “fair source,” which has been adopted by several startups.
In 2021, Elastic moved to closed source licenses after several years of conflict with Amazon’s cloud subsidiary AWS, which was selling its own managed version of Elasticsearch. While AWS was perfectly within its rights to do so given the permissive nature of the Apache 2.0 license, Elastic took umbrage at the way that AWS was marketing its incarnation, using branding such as “Amazon Elasticsearch.” Elastic believed this was causing too much confusion, as customers and end users don’t always pay too much attention to the intricacies of open source projects and the associated commercial services.
