Hip, Hip, Hooray! Elastic (Almost) Comes Back Home to Open Source
Quoting: Hip, Hip, Hooray! Elastic (Almost) Comes Back Home to Open Source - FOSS Force —
There was some unexpected good news yesterday. Elasticsearch and Kibana are again open source, available under the AGPL. Three years ago Elastic, the company behind the software, dropped open source in favor of Elastic License version 2 and Server Side Public License as its response to a dispute it was having at the time with Amazon Web Services.
More good news, as far as I’m concerned, is that Elastic doesn’t seem to be being dragged back to the open source table kicking and screaming. In fact, Shay Banon, the company’s founder and CTO, seemed to be as pleased as punch to be making the announcement yesterday on Elastic’s website.
“Elasticsearch and Kibana can be called open source again,” he said. “It is hard to express how happy this statement makes me. Literally jumping up and down with excitement here. All of us at Elastic are. Open source is in my DNA. It is in Elastic DNA. Being able to call Elasticsearch open source again is pure joy.”
Linuxiac:
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Back to Its Roots: Elasticsearch Announces Return to Open Source
Elastic has announced that it will add the Affero General Public License (AGPL) as a licensing option alongside ELv2 and Server Side Public License (SSPL). This inclusion is significant as AGPL is approved by the Open Source Initiative (OSI), eliminating any ambiguity about Elastic’s commitment to the open-source model.
The backstory to this shift is a saga of resilience and strategic adaptation. About three years ago, Elastic changed its licensing model due to conflicts with Amazon Web Services and market confusion caused by competing products.
This led to Elastic opting for a proprietary license, which, while effective in the short term, diverged from its open-source ethos. However, this move was calculated and aimed at preserving the integrity and trajectory of their products.
Also here:
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Elasticsearch is open source, again
Now Elastic have made another change: they're triple-licensing their core products, adding the OSI-complaint AGPL as the third option.
LWN:
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ElasticSearch and Kibana become free software (again)
Back in 2021, the ElasticSearch search engine and Kibana visualization platform were relicensed under the non-free Server Side Public License (SSPL). Now, Elastic (the company owning those projects) has announced that those projects will also be distributable under the Affero GPL license.
Also here:
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Wow! Elasticsearch and Kibana Back to the Future as Open-Source Offerings!
If you have managed a complex network or IT infrastructure, you know the importance of having open-source tools and services behind the scenes. These help individuals and organizations avoid things like vendor lock-in and price gouging, which can act as roadblocks to growth.
Sure, some organizations think that ditching open source is the way ahead, but many don't. Elastic is one organization that comes to mind, which now lies in between those two approaches.