Although Elastic plans to make Elasticsearch and Kibana open source again in the “upcoming weeks,” nothing is said about X-Pack, which will evidently continue to be only available under “fauxpen” licensing.
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.”
It’s fitting that Banon is the one who made the announcement. Until 2022 he was the company’s CEO, meaning he was the person who was ultimately in charge when the decision was made to make the software proprietary. In yesterday’s announcement, he explained that Elasticsearch users who need to continue using either of the “source available” licenses that have been covering the software for the past three years need not worry.
“We will be adding AGPL as another license option next to ELv2 and SSPL in the coming weeks,” he said. “We never stopped believing and behaving like an open source community after we changed the license. But being able to use the term open source, by using AGPL, an OSI approved license, removes any questions, or fud, people might have.”
Well maybe, but apparently there’s still at least one monkey wrench that needs to be removed from the machinery before Elastic can truly call itself an open source company.
While this announcement indicates that the entire Elastic Stack is now open source again (or will be “in the coming weeks”) — there’s one slight exception. While Elasticsearch, Kibana, Logstash, and Beats are all once again under open source licenses, X-Pack, which supplies security, alerting, monitoring, Graph, and reporting for Elastic Stack, appears to remain proprietary, licensed under the company’s fauxpen Elastic Software End User License Agreement.
That fly in the ointment isn’t mentioned anywhere in Banon’s announcement.
Burying the Hatchet With Amazon
Elastic’s move away from open source came as a responce to AWS’s announcement in 2019 that it planned to launch an “open distro” for Elasticsearch, which would include participation from other companies, one of them being Netflix. AWS said the project wasn’t a fork, per se, but a “value-added” distribution that would be 100% open source. This was important, Amazon said, because… well, because the Elastic Stack wasn’t 100% open source — because of X-Pack.
“We had issues with AWS and the market confusion their offering was causing,” Bannon explained. “So after trying all the other options we could think of, we changed the license, knowing it would result in a fork of Elasticsearch with a different name and a different trajectory. It’s a long story.”
The long and short of it, according to Bannon, is that the hatchet has now been buried — at least kinda sorta.
“The good news is that while it was painful, it worked,” he added. “Three years later, Amazon is fully invested in their fork, the market confusion has been (mostly) resolved, and our partnership with AWS is stronger than ever. We were even named AWS partner of the year. I had always hoped that enough time would pass that we could feel safe to get back to being an open source project – and it finally has.”
So, Elastic is again an open source company, although the waters still seem to be muddied a bit by X-Pack. We’ll see how that works out.
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