Elastic: Back to Open Source?

This week, I came across the surprising news that Elastic has decided to return Elasticsearch and Kibana to open source.

Let me remind you that 3 years ago Elastic changed their license from Apache 2.0 to semi-proprietary Server Side Public License. Teams who actively used ELK stack remember that. In response, AWS forked the latest open Elasticsearch and Kibana versions, creating OpenSearch project.

In a year, OpenSearch had 100 million downloads and gathered 8,760 pull requests from 496 contributors over the globe. It even launched its own OpenSearch Conference in 2023. The fork became extremely popular and successful.

Now, Elastic announced AGPLv3 license for Elasticsearch and Kibana products. Maybe it relates to the decrease of the interest in Elasticsearch as a product. There is also a good article on TheNewStack that makes an attempt to explain and understand the reasons of that unexpected decision, which I recommend to read if you're interested in the topic.

The main question is whether teams already using OpenSearch will switch back to Elasticsearch. I don't think so. That's easy to change the license, but it's harder to return community trust.

#news #technologies