Elastic

Elasticsearch and Kibana were Apache 2.0, and that licence is permissive by design - anyone may take the code and sell a service built on it, with no obligation to contribute anything back. In 2015 Amazon Web Services began offering exactly that: a managed Elasticsearch service. In 2019, after Elastic released parts of its commercial x-pack features under restrictive licences, AWS launched Open Distro for Elasticsearch as an alternative packaging.

**In January 2021, with release 7.11, Elastic moved Elasticsearch and Kibana off Apache 2.0** to a dual licence: the Server Side Public License, originally written by MongoDB, and the new Elastic License. Neither is approved by the Open Source Initiative. Elastic's stated intent at the time was to prevent companies providing its products as a service without collaborating with it, and AWS was named explicitly.

**Three different accounts of why exist, and all three are recorded here.** Elastic's 2021 position was about resale without collaboration. In 2024 Banon put the emphasis elsewhere, saying the problem was never AWS providing the software - Apache 2.0 permitted that - but calling it Amazon Elasticsearch, which he characterised as clear trademark infringement met with a thousand lawyers. Adrian Cockcroft, formerly of AWS, gave a third version: that AGPL alone would have blocked AWS, and that the real disagreement was AWS wanting to contribute security features to the open project while Elastic wanted to keep security commercial. **These accounts are not compatible, they come from named participants, and this page does not adjudicate between them.**

**In April 2021 AWS forked Elasticsearch and Kibana at version 7.10.2 and created OpenSearch**, under Apache 2.0, later placed with the Linux Foundation. Elastic then made its client libraries incompatible with OpenSearch, and OpenSearch wrote its own.

The community reaction is worth quoting rather than summarising, because it is the part that outlasted the argument. Drew DeVault noted that Elasticsearch belonged to its 1,573 contributors, who had granted Elastic a licence to distribute their work and not to relicense it. Simon Phipps of the Open Source Initiative said Elastic had taken what benefit it could from open source and was now spitting out the bones. Corey Quinn's version was shorter: anyone relying on assurances from Elastic should make other plans.

**In September 2024 Elastic added AGPLv3**, an OSI-approved licence, alongside SSPL and the Elastic License - triple-licensing the core products and making them open source again by any standard definition. Banon's announcement had its sections titled after Kendrick Lamar songs, which is a genuinely unusual document to find in a licensing archive. He said the change had worked: Amazon was fully invested in its fork, the market confusion was mostly resolved, and the partnership with AWS was stronger than ever. **He also explicitly denied that the 2021 change had been a mistake.**

The commercial reasoning is coherent and the outcome is instructive anyway. **The fork did not come back.** Practitioners quoted at the time were direct about why: contributors who had watched their Apache-licensed work become someone else's exclusive asset had no reason to return, and trust takes far longer to rebuild than to lose. OpenSearch continues, and the ecosystem that was one project in 2020 is two.

**Read alongside two other entries on this timeline, a pattern appears.** Tenable closed its open-source scanner in 2005 to fund the company, and the community forked it into OpenVAS. Rapid7 bought an open-source project and kept it open. Elastic closed one, was forked, and reopened it. **Three companies, three strategies, and in two of the three the fork is still running.** Whether a permissive licence is a gift or a liability depends entirely on who else can afford to operate your software at scale - which is a question nobody had to ask before hyperscale cloud existed.