Yesterday, Elastic announced they would moving their “Apache 2.0-licensed source code in Elasticsearch and Kibana to be dual licensed under Server Side Public License (SSPL) and the Elastic License” (read their full announcement here). This change means that components of Elasticsearch or Kibana in subsequent versions (7.11 and onwards) are no longer under an OSI-approved open source license. 

The decision by Elastic has made us feel somewhat justified in choosing to use Open Distro for Elasticsearch to meet our customers’ requirements. Open Distro is primarily a distribution of the Apache 2.0-licensed source code, rather than an explicit fork. The broader goal of the project “is to ensure that open source Elasticsearch continues to thrive.” This is a goal we wholeheartedly support, and we hope the project continues to do so as well.

For our current and future customers, nothing will change for you. Instaclustr will continue to support, manage, and monitor Elasticsearch as well as fix bugs, security issues, develop features, and contribute to upstream Apache 2.0 Elasticsearch. 

For the broader Elasticsearch contributor community, this is a sad day where the spirit of your contributions to the project are no longer reflected by its governing body. 

With this in mind, Instaclustr is looking specifically for experienced Elasticsearch contributors who wish to continue working on the technology in an open source-compatible framework. Please reach out to ben-at-instaclustr.com if you are interested. 

January 21 Update: AWS has just announced their plan to fork Elasticsearch and feed this into OpenDistro. So we are in good company.