[jasontedor]

Jason from Elastic here.

I want to clarify one aspect here. Elasticsearch and Kibana will be dual licensed under the Elastic License or the SSPL license, not only SSPL. The distributions that we provide will be licensed under the Elastic License, which does not have the copyleft requirements that are sometimes concerning to legal teams.

That is, if you download our distribution and run it in your infrastructure, you are subject to the Elastic License. The same license that most (90%+) of our users are already running under today, when they download our default distribution from elastic.co. This is why we say the vast majority of our users are not impacted by this change.

Note: we are considering making changes to the Elastic License to simplify it. Please see more on our [blog][0].

Disclaimer: I am on the Elasticsearch team and work for Elastic; I welcome any and all feedback.

[0]: https://www.elastic.co/blog/license-change-clarification

[Xylakant]

How is the elastic license any more compatible with the needs of other open source projects than the SSPL? Before, elasticsearch and/or kibana were usable together with (A)GPL licensed code. That’s no longer the case, neither under SSPL nor under the elastic license.

The fact that most users use the basic license may well be explained by two things:

A) Your website offers it as the primary download.

B) Elasticsearch without the basic licensed modules lacks severely when it comes to security features. It doesn’t even offer basic auth, let alone TLS or similar.

[temp667]

Sure.

The Elastic license is also a change from Apache 2.0, and is also not an OSI approved license as far as I am aware.

Doesn't the elastic license specifically limit use of software to basic features, prohibit modification of licensing control mechanisms etc. I haven't dug through it, but it seemed FAR FAR different than a normal open source license.

One question I had - is the Elastic license transferable? Ie, if you run a startup and are bought out with an asset buyout, can you transfer the stack including the Elastic licensed software to the acquiring party (assuming in the interim elastic has ceased to offer new elastic licenses so they can't get their own). Can you sell software built out on elastic licensed code and transfer the elastic license to the users so they can also use it? Or does everyone need to go back to elastic to get these licenses.

A lot of discussion about being open, but reading the details - seems far from open at first glance.

[detaro]

How do you get to that 90%+ number? I.e. how do you account for installations through Linux distro repos etc (which will likely cease to be an option for most) when describing this? Only counting your downloads is an extremely disingenuous measure of use of open-source software.

And for open-source users things definitively do not "remain as they are", given even your blog post admits it's not an open-source license.

But well, not particularly surprising you don't consider such users as "your users". Disappointing, but not surprising. Good reminder to check the CLAs required by any project I consider using.

[xeraa]

Both for DEB and RPM the packages are coming from our own registry (https://artifacts.elastic.co) and not from the Linux distributions. We also maintain our own Docker registry (and mirror that to Docker Hub though they provide some numbers). So we have a good picture about licenses, versions, operating systems,...

Philipp from Elastic.

[quink]

> when they download our default distribution from elastic.co

1. elastic.co

2. Products

3. Elasticsearch

4. Ignore three buttons, click the link "Or download and get started"

5. Ignore six buttons, click the link "Visit our downloads page"

6. Ignore twenty other links, find "The pure Apache 2.0 licensed distribution is available here." six paragraphs into the 'Notes' section.

7. Download it.

There's your any and all feedback, I'm looking forward to being let know _how_ welcome it was.

[quink]

That said, amazing that the other 10% apparently tracked thought an actual open-source licence was worth it enough to make their way through that.