Banon: License changes to Elasticsearch and Kibana

Shay Banon first announced thatElastic would move its Apache 2.0-licensed source code in Elasticsearch andKibana to be dual licensed under Server Side Public License (SSPL) and theElastic License. "To be clear, our distributions starting with 7.11will be provided only under the Elastic License, which does not have anycopyleft aspects. If you are building Elasticsearch and/or Kibana fromsource, you may choose between SSPL and the Elastic License to govern youruse of the source code."

In anotherpost Banon added some clarification. "SSPL, a copyleft licensebased on GPL, aims to provide many of the freedoms of open source, thoughit is not an OSI approved license and is not considered opensource."

There is also this articleon why the change was made. "So why the change? AWS and AmazonElasticsearch Service. They have been doing things that we think are just NOT OK since 2015 and it has only gotten worse. If we don't stand upto them now, as a successful company and leader in the market, whowill?"

The FAQ hasadditional information. "While we have chosen to avoid confusion by not using the term open source to refer to these products, we will continue to use the word Open" and Free and Open." These are simple ways to describe the fact that the product is free to use, the source code is available, and also applies to our open and collaborative engagement model in GitHub. We remain committed to the principles of open source - transparency, collaboration, and community."