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AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana (aws.amazon.com)

1314 points by ke4qqq · 2075 days ago · 935 comments on HN

Article summary

AWS has announced that it will create and maintain a fork of open source Elasticsearch and Kibana, after Elastic changed its software licensing strategy to limit how its software can be used. The new license, called the Elastic License, and the Server Side Public License, have requirements that make them unacceptable to many in the open source community. AWS will base its forks on the latest ALv2-licensed codebases, version 7.10, and will publish new GitHub repositories in the next few weeks. The forks will be included in the existing Open Distro distributions, replacing the ALv2 builds provided by Elastic.

Main themes

  • Open source licensing
  • Elasticsearch and Kibana
  • AWS and cloud services
  • Software freedom and restrictions
  • Business models and monetization
  • Community and collaboration

What commenters say

  • Elastic's decision to change its license is seen as a move to protect its business from cloud providers like AWS, which offer hosted Elasticsearch services.
  • The new license is viewed as restrictive and not truly open source, as it limits how the software can be used and requires modifications to be publicly released.
  • Some argue that Elastic's move is reasonable, as it allows the company to maintain control over its software and prevent others from profiting from it without contributing back.
  • Others believe that the license change is a betrayal of the open source community and that Elastic should have started as a proprietary company if it wanted to restrict its software's use.
  • The fork created by AWS is seen as a positive development, as it will ensure that open source versions of Elasticsearch and Kibana remain available and well-supported.
  • Some commenters have had negative experiences with AWS's hosted Elasticsearch service, citing issues with outages, restrictions, and cost.
  • The debate highlights the tension between the open source community's values of freedom and collaboration, and the business interests of companies like Elastic and AWS.
  • The license change has sparked a discussion about the definition of open source software and the role of licensing in protecting or restricting software use.