The commercial open source landscape has long been characterized by licensing disputes. Major players like Grafana and Element have shifted to more restrictive licenses, while others like HashiCorp have moved towards fully proprietary models.
However, Elastic, a company valued at $8 billion, took a different path. The creator of Elasticsearch and Kibana surprised many last month by announcing a return to open source after nearly four years of using proprietary “source available” licenses.
“It was just taking too long”
In 2021, Elastic made the move to closed-source licenses due to conflicts with AWS over their managed version of Elasticsearch. Elastic was concerned about trademark violations and customer confusion caused by AWS’s branding. Legal battles followed, leading to a resolution but draining resources.
Elastic’s co-founder, Shay Banon, expressed that the legal route was taking too long and causing market confusion. The company wanted to protect its brand without getting embroiled in prolonged legal disputes.
Back to the future
The change from proprietary to open source was a significant step for Elastic. The move led AWS to fork Elasticsearch, creating OpenSearch, which was later transitioned to the Linux Foundation.
After sufficient time had passed and OpenSearch had established itself, Elastic decided to revert to an open-source model. The shift to the AGPL license, with stricter requirements, allowed Elastic to regain its open source status.
Elastic hopes to collaborate with the OSI on new license discussions. Banon envisions a license that balances between AGPL and SSPL, emphasizing the importance of being recognized as open source.
For Elastic, the ability to call itself “open source” again holds great significance. The term symbolizes open code, community involvement, and the freedoms cherished by developers.
