Logz.io is promising new distributions for Elasticsearch and Kibana, which, in contrast to Elastics’ future direction, should appear completely as free software. The developers do not use the word fork, but due to the new licenses, the future project is left with less than a split from the original provider.

This is exactly what CEO Tomer Levy describes in his announcement of the move, because the community and many as yet unknown organizations should be involved in the new distributions. The choice of the Apache 2 license is also not surprising, as Elasticsearch has previously appeared under it. The aim is to put the free versions of Elasticsearch and Kibana under the umbrella of the CNCF or ASF.

Don’t feel sorry for Elastic Elastics CEO Shay Bannon blamed Amazon and the reluctance of the AWS cloud division to cooperate with the original developers for the license change in drastic terms. Tomer Levy doesn’t skimp on criticism himself – but at Elastic, because the developer has let the open source offerings fall asleep over the years and put the innovations into his commercial offers.

In addition, the new Server Side Public License (SSPL) would not just be a measure against AWS: Parts of the license were formulated in such a way that users would expose themselves to legal risks when using such software. In fact, when switching from MongoDB to the SSPL and now again, the OSI determined that the SSPL was not an open source license.

I entered it myself Gigant Tomer Levy generally rejects Elastics’ victim role, because it would rather be a billion dollar company that wants to force its users into commercial dependency and block competition. A look at the figures shows that in the year 2020, Elastic had sales of 427, generated 6 million US dollars, a growth of 57 percent over the previous year.

Instead of wanting to switch off AWS as a competitor with a license change, Elastic should develop a better cloud service. That is more difficult, but it would be the right step for users. The announcement of the new distributions and the new allegations can be found on the Logz.io blog. The provider offers data analysis software on the ELK stack, among other things. Meanwhile, Amazon did not comment on the allegations by Elastic.

(fo)