Author: Shay Banon
Please note: After the initial publication of this blog, we have published two additional blogs to add some details: clarification of the license agreement change and why we must change the license agreement .
The licensing agreement of Elasticsearch and Kibana is about to change
We are about to change the source code of Elasticsearch and Kibana authorized under the Apache 2.0 license to a dual license model (ie SSPL 1.0 and Elastic license) so that users can choose the license that suits them. Through this change in the license agreement, we can not only ensure that our community and customers continue to use, modify and redistribute the code in a free and open manner, but also carry out code-based collaboration, and it can also restrict cloud service providers from In the case of any feedback provided by the community, Elasticsearch and Kibana are used as external services to protect our continued investment in developing free and open products. This change will apply to all maintenance branches of Elasticsearch and Kibana, and will take effect from our upcoming version 7.11. Our distribution will continue to use the same Elastic license as it was three years ago.
This change to the source code license agreement will have no impact on most community users who use the default distribution for free , nor will it affect our cloud service customers or self-managed software customers .
In recent years, the market has undergone great changes, and the community has gradually realized that only when open source companies better protect their software can they achieve continuous innovation and make necessary investments. As many companies continue to transform to SaaS products, some cloud service providers have adopted open source products and regarded them as an external service without providing any feedback to the community. About three years ago, we opened up the commercial code and opened them fully, all of which are carried out under the Elastic license, so that we can now adopt the dual licensing strategy of SSPL and Elastic license, which is for us It is a natural step. This is similar to the practice of many other open source companies (including MongoDB , which developed SSPL ) in recent years . Although SSPL allows free and arbitrary use and modification of the product source code, it has a basic requirement, that is, under the SSPL agreement, if you provide the product as a service to the outside world, you must also publicly release any modifications you have made and your Management source code built by yourself.
Our open source journey
My personal open source journey can be traced back a long time ago. In 2005, I open sourced my first project, Compass, which provided a Java framework based on Apache Lucene. At that time, I was developing an application for recipes for my wife. In the next five years, I devoted countless weekends and nights to perfect this project, from writing code to helping users solve various problems such as faults and functions.
I didn’t think about the purpose of doing this, especially since I still have a job that has become a “side job”, but I am fascinated by it because this is an opportunity to have such a positive impact — try to open source The power of creating a high-quality product, and more importantly, building a good community around this product.
In 2009, I decided to do it again, so I started writing a brand new project, which is Elasticsearch. I spent many nights and weekends to build this project, and opened the source code in 2010. I even quit my job and decided to go all out. Help users by writing code, blogging on GitHub, sending emails, and using IRC chat tools.
And when we founded Elastic in 2012, we brought this spirit to our company. We invested a lot of money in free and open products and supported the rapid development of the user community. We expanded from simple Elasticsearch to Kibana , Logstash , Beats , and now, a series of solutions are built into the Elastic Stack : Elastic enterprise search , observability, and security .
We have mature products, cultivate a vibrant community around these products, and focus on providing users with maximum value. Today, we have hundreds of engineers, and their daily work content is to make our products better. And we have thousands of community members participating in it, helping us achieve mutual success.
I am proud of the company we have established, and I am deeply responsible for winning the trust of users. We have been an open and transparent company from the beginning of our establishment, and we have always insisted on serving the community and users wholeheartedly in various decisions.
Free and open-irreplaceable
As early as 2018, we opened up the code for free and paid proprietary features under the Elastic license (a license for obtaining source code) , and changed the default distribution to include all features, and all free features were enabled by default.
There are several reasons for this. First, this allows us to reach our paying users as we interact with the community: to achieve open communication. Furthermore, let us build more free features for our users, instead of providing these features to certain companies, they not only use our products themselves, but also use our products as their external services (such as Amazon Elasticsearch Service) and profited from our open source software without any feedback.
Our approach is very popular. Today, more than 90% of new download users have chosen this distribution, which allows us to provide so many features for free, while also establishing a successful company.
Under this new free, open (but proprietary) license, we have introduced numerous improvements. I am impressed by the amazing progress our team and community have made on all products, and I am very happy to share some of these improvements with you:
We have greatly improved the speed, scalability, and reliability of Elasticsearch through a new distributed consensus algorithm, and significantly reduced memory usage; in addition, we have also applied new data storage and compression methods to improve the index Along with query throughput, the typical index size is reduced by nearly 40%. We have added new field types for geospatial analysis to store and search logs in a more efficient way, and perform fast, case-insensitive searches on security data. In Kibana, we reduced the load time by 80% and eliminated the full page refresh, all thanks to a multi-year platform refactoring project. At the same time, we also introduced Kibana Lens' intuitive drag-and-drop data visualization experience and meters Board in-depth analysis and other key functions.
In the past three years, we have also built first-class experiences around the most common use cases. In terms of security solutions, we directly created a free and open SIEM inside Kibana, which has a powerful detection engine and supports simple rules and complex associations through the new query language EQL in Elasticsearch. We collaborated with the community to openly develop hundreds of detection rules. Moreover, we have also joined forces with the leading terminal security company Endgame to release a free and powerful malware protection function, which is also an important function in Elastic Agent; Elastic Agent is our unified and centralized management for servers and terminals. The observability and security management agent software of, will introduce more functions in the future.
In terms of observability, improvements have also gone hand in hand. We built a complete observability suite directly inside Kibana, from the real-time tail log UI to the intuitive infrastructure-level view, which can view various key indicators and alarms in the host, Pod, and container. Now, we have a fully functional APM product equipped with open source data collectors and agents, supporting OpenTelemetry, real user monitoring (RUM), comprehensive monitoring, and the recently added user experience monitoring.
In Elastic Enterprise Search, we have introduced App Search, which is based on Elasticsearch. It simplifies the process of building complex applications and provides a powerful management interface for correlation tuning and usage analysis. In addition, we also provide a free Workplace Search product that can easily integrate and search various content data sources about individuals or companies that you use, such as Google Workplace, Microsoft 365, Atlassian Jira and Confluence, and Salesforce.
We can build all these functions and provide them to our community for free, which is really amazing. Seeing the participation and adoption rate of our products, as well as the success of these new features for so many people and companies, we deeply feel the responsibility. This is possible because the vast majority of people in our community have chosen the default distribution under the Elastic license, where all these features are free and open.
Why change the license agreement?
As mentioned earlier, in the past three years, the market has continued to develop, and the community has gradually realized that open source companies can only maintain high levels of investment and innovation if they better protect their software. With the transformation of SaaS as a delivery model, some cloud service providers have taken advantage of open source products and provided them as a service without providing any feedback to the community. This practice transfers funds that could have been reinvested in the product and harms the interests of users and communities.
Like many open source counterparts, we have personally experienced this situation, from the abuse of our trademarks, to attempts to “openly” repackage our OSS products, and even get “inspiration” from our proprietary code, These practices have completely divided our community. Although each open source company takes a slightly different approach to this problem, in order to protect their investment in free software, they usually modify their open source licenses while trying to maintain the principles of openness, transparency, and collaboration. In the same way, we instinctively took this approach, making targeted changes on how to authorize our source code. This change has no impact on the vast majority of users, mainly to restrict cloud service providers from providing our software as a service.
We estimate that there will be some competitors trying to spread all kinds of concerns, uncertainties and doubts around this change. I am here to solemnly explain to those who disagree: We are free and open to products and firmly believe in the principle of community transparency. Our past performance has also proved this commitment, and we will continue to build on this basis.
What has changed
Starting from the upcoming Elastic 7.11 version, we will change the Elasticsearch and Kibana source code authorized under the Apache 2.0 license to a dual licensing model (ie SSPL + Elastic license) so that users can choose the license that suits them. SSPL is an original MongoDB license that can obtain source code. It not only embodies the principle of openness, but also plays a protective role, preventing public cloud providers from using open source products as a service without providing any feedback to the community. provide. Although SSPL allows free and arbitrary use and modification of the product source code, it has a basic requirement, that is, under the SSPL agreement, if you provide the product as a service, you must also publicly release any modifications and your own management source Code.
We chose this path because it gives us an opportunity to be as open as possible while also protecting our community and company. In some ways, this change will make us more open. As a follow-up to this change, we will start to change our free proprietary functions from Elastic license to dual license under SSPL, which will be more permissive and more in line with our goal of making the product as free and open as possible.
Although the permission to change the source code is a big deal in some respects, it actually has no effect on the vast majority of people in our community. If you are our customer, whether you are deploying on Elastic Cloud or on-premises, please rest assured that nothing has changed. If you have downloaded and used our default distribution, they are all Elastic licenses and are still free and open. If you have been contributing to Elasticsearch or Kibana's project code (thank you very much!), nothing has changed for you.
As in the past three years, we will continue to develop our code in an open manner, collaborate with our community, and release our version for free under the Elastic license. We still promise to keep all our free functions free of charge and will not make any changes. The previously free functions are still free, and the functions that require a paid subscription continue to be paid for.
Our belief in the importance of a unified community has never been stronger. This change enables us to continue to demonstrate our commitment as we did in the past 10 years, and win your trust with future actions.
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Forward-looking statements
This blog post contains forward-looking statements involving significant risks and uncertainties, including but not limited to: market opportunities regarding company code licensing, software as a service and open source server-side software, the benefits of open source innovation, and the licensing model adopted by the company Statements on the impact of the company, our future investment in research and development, and our evaluation of the solutions and product advantages. These forward-looking statements comply with the safe harbor provisions of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. These forward-looking statements reflect our current views on its plans, intentions, expectations, strategies and prospects, and are based on the information we currently have and our assumptions. Although we believe that the plans, intentions, expectations, strategies and prospects reflected or suggested in these forward-looking statements are reasonable, we do not guarantee that these plans, intentions, expectations or strategies will be achieved or realized. Due to uncertainties, risks and changes in the environment, actual results and results may differ materially from those expected in these forward-looking statements, including but not limited to: We timely and successfully implemented the new dual licensing model and realized The ability of its various advantages; the acceptance of the new licensing model by customers and our user communities; our ability to continue to build and maintain the reputation of the developer community; the influence of competitors' SaaS services; we maintain, protect, enforce and enhance our knowledge The ability of property rights; the impact of the expansion and adoption of SaaS products on the open source licensing model, and our beliefs and goals for future operations. The documents we file with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) contain other risks and uncertainties that may cause significant differences between actual results and results, including the 10-K annual report for the Japanese fiscal year ended April 30, 2020. And any subsequent reports submitted to the SEC. SEC documents can be found on the "Investor Relations" section of the Elastic website (ir.elastic.co) or the SEC website (www.sec.gov). Except as required by law, Elastic Corporation assumes no obligation to update any such forward-looking statements, and currently has no plans to update it.
Original source: https://www.elastic.co/cn/blog/licensing-change