Shay Banon, founder and CTO of Elastic, says the AGPL (GNU Affero General Public License) will be added to Elasticsearch and Kibana, three and half years after removing the Apache 2.0 license from the code.

Banon stated: “we will be adding AGPL as another license option next to ELv2 [Elastic v2] and SSPL [Server Side Public License] in the coming weeks.” 

ELv2 prohibits offering the product as a managed service, and SSPL, created by MongoDB Inc, is a source-available license that requires the code for the service management system to be published. The intent, as Banon said in January 2021, was to prevent “companies from taking our Elasticsearch and Kibana products and providing them directly as a service without collaborating with us,” with AWS specifically in mind. By contrast, AGPL is an OSI (Open Source Initiative) approved license, designed for server software, which requires modifications to the software also to be published under the same license.

Elasticsearch is a search and analytics database engine and Kibana is a dashboard which interacts with Elasticsearch and provides data visualizations.

In April 2021 AWS introduced OpenSearch, under the Apache 2.0 license, as a project forked from Elasticsearch and Kibana 7.10.2. 

According to Banon, the license change worked. “Amazon is fully invested in their fork, the market confusion has been (mostly) resolved, and our partnership with AWS is stronger than ever,” he said. Banon claimed that this is the reason for the new license change, and not that the 2021 decision was a mistake or that Elastic was faring badly in the market. “It’s an entirely different landscape now,” he said.

The key question though is in what way the landscape has changed. AWS OpenSearch has momentum, though Elasticsearch remains a better-known brand, so the 2021 license change created a competitor as well as removing what Banon called “market confusion.” The removal of the Apache 2.0 license also created bad feeling, for example among contributors to Elasticsearch whose work was relicensed.

According to former AWS VP Adrian Cockcroft, commenting on Hacker News, the core of the issue in 2021 “was that AWS wanted to contribute security features to the open source project and Elastic wanted to keep security as an enterprise feature, so rejected all the approaches AWS made at the time.” Cockcroft added that “their attitude was that they controlled the project and didn’t want AWS to make big contributions to the open source distribution that would reduce their differentiation. They were also mixing licenses in the code base and deliberately making it hard for AWS to use.”

Banon remarked that “the stock market will have its ups and downs,” perhaps an acknowledgment that Elastic shares have not performed well since 2021, though total subscription customer count, according to the company’s financial reports, has increased from 15,000 in April 2021 to 21,200 in the latest filing.

It is also notable that Elastic Cloud revenue is up 30 percent year-on-year. Elastic Cloud is managed by Elastic and hosted on AWS, Google Cloud or Microsoft Azure, so Banon’s seemingly surprising remark about the strength of the partnership with AWS looks well founded.