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Elasticsearch is Open Source, Again (www.elastic.co)

submitted 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[D.N.A] Elasticsearch and Kibana can be called Open Source again. 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.

[LOVE.] The tl;dr is that we will be adding AGPL as another license option next to ELv2 and SSPL in the coming weeks. 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.

[Not Like Us] We never stopped believing in Open Source at Elastic. I never stopped believing in Open Source. I’m going on 25 years and counting as a true believer. So why the change 3 years ago? We had issues with AWS and the market confusion their offering was causing. 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.

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[–] [email protected] 19 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (1 children)

Do you... not know how multi-licensing works? You can use the project's code under the terms of whichever license you prefer, you don't use all three at once. Simply putting the AGPLv3 does remove unfair restrictions, because it means you don't have to use either of the proprietary licenses the project was previously only available under.

[+] [email protected] -5 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (2 children)

[deleted]

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 months ago

Are you saying that the mere existence of the option of using a non open source license invalidate the provisions in the open source option? That is, if they offered only AGPL, they would be oss but if they offer your choice of AGPL and something non oss, the AGPL option would no longer be oss too? The article you linked does not address this as far as I can tell.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 2 months ago (1 children)

The SSPL is irrelevant, you pick the AGPL license and the SSPL doesn't apply to you.

Qt is dual-licensed as proprietary and LGPL and nobody complains about that, KDE is in most distro's repos. You pick the LGPL licensed version and you're good to go, the proprietary license doesn't apply to you.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 months ago (1 children)

What benefits does the developer get from using both licenses, if the user gets to decide which one to use? Serious question, by the way. I truly don't know.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 months ago

The developer benefits from reaching more people, some of whom are likely to purchase the proprietary license. Or sometimes you dual-license just so that licenses are compatible. Each license has pros and cons for both the developers and the users.

Qt for example, the LGPL means you need to dynamically link to it, and if you ship your own Qt libraries you must provide the source code for it. But if you're a company that writes proprietary software and can't dynamically link, then you can purchase the proprietary license which allows you to do a lot more, but you're compensating the devs for it. And for the Qt devs that's good because either you pay them, or you use it for free but must share your changes with everyone.

For ElasticSearch, that makes it so Amazon can't just patch it up and sell the modified version without sharing what they changed. They wanted to add back a FOSS license to stop the bleed to OpenSearch which many in the FOSS community switched to purely for the license because even separate software should be compatible license-wise if you want a sustainable FOSS project. But the AGPL requires sources merely for being able to talk to it over the network, so Elastic gets the free dev work, or the juicy license payments. The other free licenses achieve similar goals with technical differences that might matter for the user. But as a developer using ElasticSearch maybe you do want to ship your software under the SSPL, so you can pick the SSPL version.

Dual-licensing MIT/GPL for example, you can build proprietary software, or GPL software where you can vendor it in as GPL-only as well, and thus guarantee your user their GPL rights.