[bad_user]

If you use the Elastic license, legally speaking, you're in hot waters. The biggest problem with software licenses for freemium is that you have no contract with the company, money doesn't change hands, and the license itself can be open to interpretation. What's a competitor anyway? This sounds like that JSON license saying you shouldn't use the software for evil.

The Open Source licenses have been vetted and are time tested. That's one big reason for why Open Source is valuable. When you adopt an OSS project, you know exactly what you're getting, and the legal departments of corporations are prepared for it. Some are banning copyleft licenses, of course, for good reasons, but the knowledge is there.

Personally, I wouldn't touch the Elastic license.

[jotaen]

The Elastic license doesn’t use the term “competitor”. To me, the definition of the limitation is actually pretty clear:

> You may not provide the software to third parties as a hosted or managed service, where the service provides users with access to any substantial set of the features or functionality of the software.

https://www.elastic.co/licensing/elastic-license

[bonzini]

It doesn't use the word, but "access to any substantial set of the features or functionality of the software as a hosted or managed service" is a specific kind of competition, and who is a competitor can change at any time depending on what functionality Elastic adds, even if you had reimplemented some of the enterprise functionality in a private fork.

[nijave]

Imo "substantial set of features" is pretty ambiguous. If you're using search software, then you have a search use case in your product. At what point does your product cross the threshold into a competitor?

It seems risky to use in anything exposed as a customer facing feature

Search may be 10% of your software but what if your software is a managed email provider (or really anything) and you're pretty much exposing Elasticsearch directly through a minimal interface?