If you have not heard, elasticsearch recently updated their licence to one based on sspl (server-side public licence) created and adopted by MongoDB. elastic.co/blog/licensing-change

If you like watching more than reading, I talk about this in my latest video.

Why? 🤔

While there are many reasons for it and most of them are a good read available here: elastic.co/pricing/faq/licensing but the most important reason is believed to be limiting the abuse by cloud providers.

You may not provide the products to others as a managed service.

Now, this means that as a single user or a company, the licence change should not affect you. It only affects those companies that provide elasticsearch as a managed service.

They go into more detail about how AWS is a pain in the *** open-source on their blog here: elastic.co/blog/why-license-change-AWS

The result

1. Most cloud providers have contract/agreement with elasticsearch and will be able to provide it as a service.

2. Amazon, on the other hand, created a fork of the latest release and will work on creating a new product managed by them.

You might think why Amazon would do such a thing but turns out they did try to answer this in very detail when they specifically talked about elasticsearch licence changes on their blog available here: stepping up for a truly open-source elasticsearch

By the way, if you are more interested in whether sspl can be called an open-source licence you may find the blog post by open source initiative interesting: opensource.org/node/1099