Elasticsearch will be open source again as CTO declares changed landscape • DEVCLASS
Shay Banon, founder and CTO of Elastic, says the AGPL (GNU Affero General Public License) will be added to Elasticsearch and Kibana, three and half years after removing the Apache 2.0 license from the code.
Banon stated: “we will be adding AGPL as another license option next to ELv2 [Elastic v2] and SSPL [Server Side Public License] in the coming weeks.”
ELv2 prohibits offering the product as a managed service, and SSPL, created by MongoDB Inc, is a source-available license that requires the code for the service management system to be published. The intent, as Banon said in January 2021, was to prevent “companies from taking our Elasticsearch and Kibana products and providing them directly as a service without collaborating with us,” with AWS specifically in mind. By contrast, AGPL is an OSI (Open Source Initiative) approved license, designed for server software, which requires modifications to the software also to be published under the same license.
Elasticsearch is a search and analytics database engine and Kibana is a dashboard which interacts with Elasticsearch and provides data visualizations.
