Elastic founder on returning to open source four years after going proprietary
Elastic founder and CTO Shay Banon explains why the company returned to open source, four years after going proprietary.
Licensing kerfuffles have long been a defining facet of the commercial open source space. Some of the biggest vendors have switched to a more restrictive “copyleft” license, as Grafana and Element have done, or gone full proprietary, as HashiCorp did last year with Terraform.
In a surprising move, Elastic, the company behind the popular search and data retrieval engine Elasticsearch, has decided to reverse its decision to switch to a proprietary license and make Elasticsearch open source once more. This decision goes against the trend of many companies abandoning open source and instead opting for proprietary licenses.
The company's decision to switch to a proprietary license in 2021 was due to a trademark dispute with Amazon's cloud subsidiary AWS, which was selling its own managed version of Elasticsearch. However, Elastic has now decided to abandon its proprietary license and return to an open source model.
According to Shay Banon, the company's co-founder and CTO, the decision to switch back to open source was made because the proprietary license was taking too long to resolve the trademark issue, and the company wanted to safeguard its brand. Banon also expressed his personal love for open source and his desire to be part of the open source community.
Elastic has chosen to use the AGPL (Affero General Public License) instead of the permissive Apache 2.0 license it used previously. The AGPL has greater restrictions, requiring any derivative software to be released under the same AGPL license. This decision allows Elastic to call itself open source again, as the AGPL is recognized as an open source license by the Open Source Initiative (OSI).
Banon hopes to work with the OSI to create a new license or have a discussion about which licenses get to be classified as open source. He believes that the perfect license would sit between the AGPL and SSPL (Server Side Public License), which is used by MongoDB. For now Banon is happy to simply be able to call Elastic's products "open source" again, as it encapsulates the code being open and the community aspects.
The company's decision to go open source again is a significant move, as it goes against the trend of many companies abandoning open source. The company's decision to use the AGPL license instead of the Apache 2.0 license shows that it is willing to make compromises to achieve its goal of being part of the open source community.
Elastic's decision to return to open source is a testament to the company's commitment to the open source philosophy and its desire to be part of the community. The company's willingness to work with the OSI to create a new license or discuss the classification of open source licenses also demonstrates its dedication to the open source community.