The author Shay ms Banon

We have a few questions to clarify regarding the recent licensing change for Elasticsearch and Kibana, and while we’re always updating our FAQ, we’d like to clarify who will be affected by this change:

  • Our locally deployed customers or Elastic Cloud customers will not be affected.
  • The vast majority of our users will not be affected.
  • Users who adopt our product and sell it directly as a Service (such as Amazon Elasticsearch Service) will be affected.

If you are using any of these products or building applications on top of Elasticsearch and Kibana, our goal is to protect you. We are constantly updating our FAQs based on the questions we receive, but if you have any other questions you need answered, please contact us at [email protected].

We also want to explain how the dual licensing model works. After we change the Elasticsearch and Kibana source code under the Apache 2.0 license to SSPL + Elastic, there are two license modes to choose from:

  • Known as SSPL — millions of people use MongoDB today under this license. We chose this license as one of the licensing models to make the choice easier for the millions of developers who use MongoDB. SSPL is a GPL-based Copyleft license designed to give users the freedom provided by an open source license in multiple ways, although it is not an OSI-approved license and is not considered an open source license.
  • The Elastic license is also well known – if you are using our default distribution and you are already using it, as millions of users and over 90% of downloaders have over the past 3 years, you will not be affected at all. Under this license, the source code is available for free use without the SSPL’s Copyleft restrictions. The Elastic license forbids selling our product as a Service (e.g., Amazon Elasticsearch Service); Redistribute products; Tamper with the source code to use our paid features without subscribing to them, or to put a modified version into production.

The future of Elastic licensing

As mentioned in our FAQ, based on the feedback we’ve received so far, we’ll be considering ways to further simplify Elastic licensing. Our goal is highly consistent with the spirit of BSL. BSL was created by MariaDB and adopted by CockroachDB, who talked in their excellent blog about why they decided to take this approach: “… We think this is the best way to balance business needs with our commitment to open source.”

BSL, endorsed by OSI founder Bruce Perens, is a simple parameterized license that each company can customize to its own needs. This license gives you the right to copy, modify, create derivative works and redistribute them, provided that the parameters of the “additional rights” are met. We are evaluating additional rights grants that are allowed for production, with only 3 basic restrictions:

  • You may not use licensed works to provide Elasticsearch/Kibana as a service.
  • You may not hack the software to enable our paid features without subscribing.
  • You may not remove, replace, or hide the Elastic brand and trademark of the product (e.g., logos, etc.).

Then, after a period of time (usually 3-4 years, but no more than 5 years), these restrictions expire and the source code is automatically converted to an open source license (in our case, Apache 2.0).

To be clear, BSL is not an OSI-approved license.

We’re taking our time to work on this — ideally a single license that covers both our free and paid features while remaining as open as possible, which is a delicate balance. This is especially important if it means the code becomes open source after 3-4 years. If we could do this safely, it would provide more freedom for our commercial functionality and a simple, single license for our distribution. This is a challenge worth striving for. We are concerned about misuse of our products, and you know who :), so please be patient.

If we decide that’s not the right approach, we’ll consider splitting the license into a BSL-based Elastic community license and a simplified Elastic license for free features and paid features, respectively.

As mentioned in our blog post, our goal is to complete this change before the next release 7.11, so we’d love to hear from you! Let us know if this approach works for your use case at [email protected].

Original: www.elastic.co/cn/blog/lic…