Wow! Elasticsearch and Kibana Back to the Future as Open-Source Offerings!

If you have managed a complex network or IT infrastructure, you know the importance of having open-source tools and services behind the scenes. These help individuals and organizations avoid things like vendor lock-in and price gouging, which can act as roadblocks to growth.

Sure, some organizations think that ditching open source is the way ahead, but many don't. Elastic is one organization that comes to mind, which now lies in between those two approaches.

Their two popular offerings, Elastisearch and Kibana, were taken off open-source licenses in 2021 in favor of more restrictive ones. But, in the years since, their growth has been something of a benchmark in the industry.

Now, with a recent announcement, those two tools are returning to their open-source roots.

Open-Source Is The Way To Go

a screenshot of the elastic homepage — Elastic's homepage.

Going forward, both Elasticsearch and Kibana will be available under the AGPL license, joining the existing two non-open-source licenses, the Server Side Public License (SSPL) and the Elastic License.

Now, users get to opt for an open-source license, which used to be the case a few years earlier. You see, back in 2021, Elastic had to take some drastic measures to prevent AWS from misusing their work.

There was even a lawsuit between Elastic and Amazon over the issue. But, since then, both of these organizations have patched up, with Elastic having a more productive partnership with AWS nowadays.

If you were wondering how this new license affects existing users and contributors, the short answer is that it doesn't. This is just another license option alongside the existing two that makes both Elasticsearch and Kibana more accessible.

While announcing this move, the founder of Elastic, Shay Banon, made it a point to address the most likely keyboard warrior opinions they might face; one of those was “AGPL is not true open source, license X is”, and to that, he says:

AGPL is an OSI approved license, and it's a widely adopted one. For example, MongoDB used to be AGPL and Grafana is AGPL. It shows that AGPL doesn’t affect usage or popularity. We chose AGPL because we believe it’s the best way to start to pave a path, with OSI, towards more Open Source in the world, not less.

The OSI mentioned above is the Open Source Initiative, which is the leading authority on open-source licenses. It's good to see that Elastic has opted for one of OSI's approved licenses.

If you want to take a look at Elasticsearch and Kibana's source code, head to Elastic's GitHub page, where you will all the relevant repositories.

Elastic (GitHub)

For further reading on these licensing changes and related topics, you can give the licensing FAQ a read.

💬 Are you excited about this change? Moved to some other services? Let me know below!

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