In a blog post, CEO Shay Bannon justifies why Elasticsearch no longer appears as free software. Amazon is solely responsible for the step, whose behavior towards the developers of the search engine is unacceptable. Now, as the market leader, Elastic has to stand up to the group.

Specifically, it is about AWS offering Elasticsearch without Amazon cooperating with Elastic. The name Amazon Elasticsearch represents a trademark infringement, all attempts to clarify with the group have failed and ultimately made a lawsuit necessary.

Amazon Elasticsearch: Fork or no fork? Furthermore, AWS would repeatedly advertise its services with a cooperation with Elastic, which however does not exist. Again and again this confuses the community. Amazon’s own distribution for Elasticsearch caused even more irritation, with parts of the code coming from the developer’s commercial features.

Shay Bannon repeatedly emphasizes that nothing changes for the users – and he does I also do not speak out against cooperation with cloud providers, provided that this corresponds to the basic open source ideas of transparency, cooperation and openness. In fact, the CEO of Amazon publicly accused Amazon of violating these principles.

The license change will take place with the upcoming version 7. 11, from which the Elastic License and the Server Side Public License (SSPL) are available. All allegations against AWS can be found in the blog entry from Elastic. iX asked Amazon to comment on the allegations, which was not yet available at the time the report was published.

(fo)