There’s no question that Elastic has built a truly amazing company, based on the Apache 2.0 open source business model, and on the shoulders of other projects like Lucene. Last week, Elastic announced that, starting with version 7.11, Elasticsearch will now be licensed via SSPL, a license that Mongo released in 2018.
So you may be wondering what this all means. Here are what we anticipate will be a few Frequently Asked Questions around this Elasticsearch licensing change. We’ll continue to update this blog as new questions arise.
It actually doesn’t! ChaosSearch purposely created a game changing database and index that uses "zero" Elasticsearch or Lucene... providing performance and scale that is groundbreaking, all the while dramatically reducing costs compared to Elastic Stack (i.e ELK). We (ChaosSearch) transform customers' cloud object storage like S3 into a multi-model analytic database. We love Text Search APIs (for Log Analytics), but we also love Relational SQL APIs (for BI Analytics).
Good news - no impact here either! We actually use Kibana from Amazon’s Open Distro, which is Apache 2.0 licensed. AWS will continue to support this. For more info on why we chose Open Distro - read our blog post from August 2019 here!
Clearly, companies that use Elasticsearch under the hood and offer some form of "search" as a service will need to evaluate the economic impact of this licencing change on their business models, and make adjustments as needed.