ElasticSearch and Kibana become free software (again) [LWN.net]

Back in 2021, the ElasticSearch search engine and Kibana visualization platform were relicensed under the non-free Server Side Public License (SSPL). Now, Elastic (the company owning those projects) has announced that those projects will also be distributable under the Affero GPL license.

We never stopped believing and behaving like an open source community after we changed the license. But being able to use the term Open Source, by using AGPL, an OSI approved license, removes any questions, or fud, people might have.

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Weird

Posted Aug 30, 2024 20:46 UTC (Fri) by jkingweb (subscriber, #113039) [Link] (5 responses)

Those square-bracket parentheticals are... really weird. I can't help but feel a little condescended to.

Weird

Posted Aug 30, 2024 21:11 UTC (Fri) by rbtree (subscriber, #129790) [Link] (4 responses)

They are references to Kendrick Lamar songs. A tale as old as time:

https://old.reddit.com/r/FellowKids

The post probably should have been targeted at serious C-suites. There is no trust left in Elastic, I don't know how many users they realistically expect to come back hoping that license will not change again at some point.

Weird

Posted Aug 30, 2024 22:21 UTC (Fri) by Deleted user 129183 (guest, #129183) [Link] (3 responses)

> They are references to Kendrick Lamar songs.

Could be worse. Could be T***or Sw**t songs…

Weird

Posted Aug 31, 2024 9:45 UTC (Sat) by rsidd (subscriber, #2582) [Link] (2 responses)

[Offtopic] Starring out her name as if it is a cuss word is distasteful.

Personally I don't often listen to her music—just not my genre—but I find plenty to admire about her.

Weird

Posted Aug 31, 2024 11:29 UTC (Sat) by Deleted user 129183 (guest, #129183) [Link] (1 responses)

> Personally I don't often listen to her music—just not my genre—but I find plenty to admire about her.

Sorry, but I fail to see what is admirable about Blandie. Unless you admire her for being a climate terrorist, or her chart manipulation, or her pseudointellectualism, or her refusal to speak up about Vienna or Tr*mp, or…

Meanwhile Ariana has been cancelled for much less.

Stop now

Posted Aug 31, 2024 13:30 UTC (Sat) by corbet (editor, #1) [Link]

This kind of stuff is wholly inappropriate for LWN. Stop it here.

this totally has nothing to do with...

Posted Aug 31, 2024 7:59 UTC (Sat) by jhoblitt (subscriber, #77733) [Link] (4 responses)

Opensearch gaining massive traction.

this totally has nothing to do with...

Posted Sep 2, 2024 8:03 UTC (Mon) by nim-nim (subscriber, #34454) [Link] (3 responses)

OpenSearch is marginal here (Amazon-controled and Amazon does not sell support services just saas).

Computing is moving to the cloud, managing cloudy clustered systems is done via SRE practices, SRE uses observability methods, the CNCF has standardised (and continues to standardise) a lot of this problem-space, Elastic credibility on implementing open standards via common open source components is nil. Plus observability makes a lot of use of metrology and Elastic sucks at this (why do we need to implement metrology seriously when we are the market leader for logs?).

If you’re in this kind of thing you can google the Gartner observability magic quadrant for the past years, traditional closed-source vendors like Elastic are stagnating at best, Grafana (via Loki/Mimir) has almost reached the quadrant top (and is at the top for on-premise solutions since Dynatrace is unable to offer the same product on-premises and in the cloud), and Chronosphere (fluent/m3db) joined the top too (granted is saases its logs processing at crowdstrike). Gartner is pretty good at tracking what enterprise customers think.

That is why Elastic is back-pedalling furiously. When your core offering is being the obvious solution, no need to think, you can not afford losing the first place.

I expect ClickHouse will joing Grafana soonish, a lot of big companies are pouring engineering here and make no secret of it.

this totally has nothing to do with...

Posted Sep 2, 2024 8:56 UTC (Mon) by nim-nim (subscriber, #34454) [Link]

To show how much Elastic/Opensearch have lost traction, look up ECS. It was supposed to be the big Elastic-centric standard that would cement its position as the market leader. And it only survived a couple of months before Microsoft announced Elastic had (spontaneously no doubt) agreed to fold it in the OpenTelemetry effort (not as the main component, and after a rewrite to apply OpenTelemetry design decisions).

this totally has nothing to do with...

Posted Sep 4, 2024 21:50 UTC (Wed) by carlosrodfern (subscriber, #166486) [Link] (1 responses)

Opensearch/Elasticsearch has many other uses in the industry beside logs.
I have been to Elasticsearch user conferences and I have seen many of them.

this totally has nothing to do with...

Posted Sep 5, 2024 13:13 UTC (Thu) by taladar (subscriber, #68407) [Link]

Maybe but most of those are shared with all of its competitors too.

It's in the name

Posted Sep 1, 2024 8:58 UTC (Sun) by timrichardson (subscriber, #72836) [Link]

They are flexible on licensing. Name checks out.

licence switch every three years

Posted Sep 1, 2024 18:53 UTC (Sun) by amarao (guest, #87073) [Link] (2 responses)

If they ever regain market share, what is preventing them from switching to proprietary again?

They are right, changing license cleared a lot of confusion. It become clear how much they care about opensource.

With those hoops with license they start not from zero, but from negative goodwill.

licence switch every three years

Posted Sep 2, 2024 0:12 UTC (Mon) by jhoblitt (subscriber, #77733) [Link]

If the source and trademark is transferred to a community run/controlled organization, then users might come back. Otherwise, the ship has sailed...

licence switch every three years

Posted Sep 3, 2024 20:35 UTC (Tue) by Lennie (subscriber, #49641) [Link]

It's marketing unless they have a system in place when they can't easily change the license anymore.

Too late

Posted Sep 4, 2024 21:53 UTC (Wed) by carlosrodfern (subscriber, #166486) [Link]

To many users already migrated away from it.

AGPL is a good choice in this age of big corp cloud providers. Many good examples where it has worked better than the alternative.