Texmex posted about the license change at Elastic to make their previously open source offering more similar to the MongoDB model. Here was the Elastic blog announcing this.
https://www.elastic.co/blog/licensing-change
They followed that up with Elastic CEO Shay Banon’s blog as to why they felt they had to make that change, because of Amazon’s (some would say “questionable”) competitive practices.
https://www.elastic.co/blog/why-license-change-AWS
Our license change is aimed at preventing companies from taking our Elasticsearch and Kibana products and providing them directly as a service without collaborating with us.
Our license change comes after years of what we believe to be Amazon/AWS misleading and confusing the community - enough is enough.
We’ve tried every avenue available including going through the courts, but with AWS’s ongoing behavior, we have decided to change our license so that we can focus on building products and innovating rather than litigating.
AWS’s behavior has forced us to take this step and we do not do so lightly. If they had not acted as they have, we would not be having this discussion today.
And here is Amazon AWS’s blog response to Elastic’s license change stating they will create a fork.
https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/opensource/stepping-up-for-a-tr…
This means that Elasticsearch and Kibana will no longer be open source software. In order to ensure open source versions of both packages remain available and well supported, including in our own offerings, we are announcing today that AWS will step up to create and maintain a ALv2-licensed fork of open source Elasticsearch and Kibana.
They go on to take some potshots at Elastic…
Last week, after reneging on this promise, Elastic updated that same page with a footnote that says “circumstances have changed.”
Elastic knows what they’re doing is fishy. The community has told them this (e.g., see Brasseur, Quinn, DeVault, and Jacob). It’s also why they felt the need to write an additional blustery blog (on top of their initial license change blog) to try to explain their actions as “AWS made us do it.”
It’s all a very interesting and public back-and-forth that I feel will benefit Elastic in the near term, and long run. My only experience with a (very) similar instance of this was MongoDB and AWS, which has not turned out badly for MDB as far as I can tell. ESTC has had a good run since the pandemic, in contrast with their first year and a half of public existence when they seemed pretty range bound and undervalued. They’ve consistently grown well and are actually one of the somewhat relatively undervalued companies we look at here (although I don’t think many still own it). But I think they will continue to get more respect from Mr. Market. I used to own a larger amount of ESTC, but reduced it to a relatively small holding of about 4% currently, although I’m looking at increasing it some.
I don’t claim to understand the technology, I just try to follow the financials and business potential. Having said that, I know that Datadog uses Elasticsearch as a core component of their infrastructure, can someone more knowledgeable comment on whether or not this license change at Elastic will affect Datadog at all?