Heavy news: Elastic company is about to modify ElasticSearch's open source license to restrict the use of cloud service providers
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On January 15, Shay Banon, founder of ElasticSearch and CEO of Elastic, announced that the Apache 2.0-licensed source code agreement of Elasticsearch and Kibana will be modified to SSPL (Server Side Public License, server-side public license) ) Double agreement with Elastic License! Below is the full translation of Shay Banon's modification of the Elasticsearch and Kibana open source agreements.
Note: Below we refer to Elastic Company (or Shay Banon)
We are changing the Apache 2.0 license of ElasticSearch and Kibana source code to a server-side public license (SSPL) and Elastic License dual license, and let users choose which license to apply for. This license change ensures that our community and customers can use, modify, redistribute, and collaborate on the code freely and openly. It also protects our continued investment in developing free and open products by restricting cloud service providers from providing Elasticsearch and Kibana services. This modification will apply to all maintenance branches of these two products and will occur before the upcoming 7.11 release. Our distribution will continue to use the Elastic License used for the past three years.
This change in source code licensing has no impact on the vast majority of community users who use our default release version for free, Elastic cloud customers, and customers who self-manage software.
In recent years, as the market has developed, the community has realized that open source companies need to better protect their software in order to continue to innovate and make necessary investments. As many companies begin to switch to SaaS products, some of these cloud service providers have adopted open source products and provided them as services without the need to invest in the community. Nearly three years ago, we opened up the commercial code and created a free layer, all of which were carried out under the Elastic License. Using the SSPL or Elastic License dual licensing strategy is our natural next step. This is similar to what many other open source companies have done over the years, including MongoDB, which developed SSPL. SSPL allows free and unrestricted use and modification, but there is a simple requirement: under the SSPL agreement, if you provide the product as a service, you must also publicly release any modifications and the source code of your own management.
Why modify the open source agreement
As mentioned earlier, in the past three years, with the development of the market, the community has realized that open source companies need to better protect their software in order to maintain a high level of investment and innovation. With the shift in using SaaS as a delivery model, some cloud service providers have taken advantage of open source products and provided them as services without making any contribution to the community. This practice diverts funds that could have been reinvested in the product and hurts users and the community.
Like our open source counterparts, we have personally experienced this situation, from the abuse of our trademarks to direct attempts to repackage our OSS products with the "openness" of open source products to split our community, and even from our proprietary There is "inspiration" in the code. Although every open source company has adopted a slightly different approach to this problem, they usually modify their open source licenses to protect their investment in free software, while trying to maintain the principles of openness, transparency, and collaboration. Similarly, we have also adopted this approach to make targeted changes to how to authorize our source code. This change will not affect the vast majority of our users, but it will restrict cloud service providers from providing our software as a service.
We estimate that some of Elastic's competitors will try to spread all kinds of FUD around this change (Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt, Chinese means fear, confusion, and doubt. FUD originated from the mouth of Gene Amdal, Gene ·Amdahl was originally an IBM engineer, and then left IBM to establish Amdahl and become an IBM competitor. FUD originally referred to IBM sales staff instilling negative ideas about Amdahl and other competitors’ products on customers. Suspicion and fear are injected into it, making customers mistakenly believe that they have no other choice but the company’s products.). Let me make it clear to those who disagree, we deeply believe in the freedom and openness of products and the transparency of the community. Our past performance has proved this commitment, and we will continue to work hard on the basis of this commitment.
What has changed?
Starting from the upcoming Elastic 7.11 version, we will replace the Apache 2.0 license codes of ElasticSearch and Kibana with dual licenses of SSPL and Elastic License, allowing users to choose which license to apply for. SSPL is a source code license created by MongoDB. It embodies the principle of open source and provides protection for public cloud providers. These public cloud providers provide open source products as services without providing any return. SSPL allows free and unrestricted use and modification, but there is a simple requirement: under the SSPL agreement, if you provide the product as a service, you must also publicly release any modifications and the source code of your own management.
We chose this path because it gives us an opportunity to be as open as possible while protecting our community and company. In some ways, this change has made us more open. As a follow-up to this change, we will begin to modify our free proprietary features from Elastic License to dual licensing of SSPL and Elastic License, which will be more forgiving and better meet our goals to make our products as possible The place is free and open.
Although changing the license of our source code is a big deal in some ways, the vast majority of people in our community will not be affected by this. If you are our customer, no matter whether it is in Elastic Cloud or on premises, nothing has changed. If you keep downloading and using our default distribution, it is still free and open, also using Elastic License. If you have been contributing to ElasticSearch or Kibana (thanks!) you will not change anything.
We will continue to develop our code in an open manner, cooperate with our community, and release our code for free under the Elastic License, just like we have done for the past three years. We still promise to keep all our free functions or use them for free, and we will not make any changes. The previously free functions are still free to use, and those that require paid subscriptions are still paid subscriptions.
Up to now, the known events for big data software service providers to modify the agreement are as follows
• In October 2018, MongoDB announced that its open source license was switched from GNU AGPLv3 to Server Side Public License (SSPL);
• In November 2018, Graph Database Neo4j also announced that the enterprise version was completely closed source;
• In December 2018, Confluent Company Jay Kreps, the co-founder and CEO of Jay Kreps, announced on the official Confluent blog that some open source components of the Confluent platform have switched from Apache 2.0 to the Confluent Community License.
This article is mainly translated from: Upcoming licensing changes to Elasticsearch and Kibana[1]
引用链接
[1] Upcoming licensing changes to Elasticsearch and Kibana: https://www.elastic.co/cn/blog/licensing-change