Open source software maker Elastic is reportedly switching its source code from the previous Apache 2.0-license to a new Server Side Public License (SSPL) as well as the Elastic License. Thus, Amazon Web Services, for instance, will soon no longer be offering Elasticsearch as a cloud service product for their clients.
As TechRadar reports, Elastic is well-known for the open source search services that it offers and its famous analytic engine called Elasticsearch. Moreover, the company has clients from large companies including Linkedin, Walmart, and Netflix who use Elastic's data visualization dashboard called Kibana.
Most Large Companies will Remain Unaffected with License Change
According to Elastic CEO Shay Banon in a blogpost on their official website, the move is important to give users more choices.
"We are moving our Apache 2.0-licensed source code in Elasticsearch and Kibana to be dual licensed under Server Side Public License (SSPL) and the Elastic License, giving users the choice of which license to apply. This license change ensures our community and customers have free and open access to use, modify, redistribute, and collaborate on the code." She said.
As News Chant notes, with the recent licensing change, it is expected that these large companies and partners will be severely affected. However Shay Banon insisted in the blogpost that the switch will merely be a technical change where the majority of Elastic's users will not be affected.
"This change in source code licensing has no impact on the overwhelming majority of our user community who use our default distribution for free. It also has no impact on our cloud customers or self-managed software customers.", she adds.
However, one important reason why the license change happened is to prevent fraudulent acts by big companies that do not want to deal directly with Elastic.
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License Change Prevents Companies from Taking ElasticSearch and Kibana without Dealing with Elastic
Amazon Web services has been known to opt out of colalaborating directly with Elastic. Instead, they opted to take ElasticSearch without dealing with Elastic. Companies like Microsoft and Google also have Elasticsearch. However, there is a big difference as both Microsoft and Google have a business relationship with Elastic while AWS does not. For Elastic, this is not an ethical move. Thus, it was necessary to do the licensing change.
Shay Banon said in a more recent in a blog post entitled Amazon: NOT OK - why we had to change Elastic licensing the reason why they had to change license.
"They have been doing things that we think are just NOT OK since 2015 and it has only gotten worse. If we don't stand up to them now, as a successful company and leader in the market, who will? Our license change is aimed at preventing companies from taking our Elasticsearch and Kibana products and providing them directly as a service without collaborating with us."
The licensing change is claimed to provide a better experience for users and a more ethical relationship between companies, but it is also expected that the cost may increase in cloud computing services.
In order for cloud providers to offer Elasticsearch services under the SSPL, they need to agree to open source their hosting cloud's infrastructure. While most AWS software is already open source, Amazon will likely never agree to open source all of it.
Businesses that use Elasticsearch and Kibana could soon see their cloud computing costs increase as a result of the licensing changes made by Elastic.
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Written by Nikki D
