Elastic Reverses Course, Returns to Open Source After Four Years
Enterprise search giant Elastic abandons its proprietary licenses to return to open source, bucking the industry trend of tightening software restrictions. Co-founder Shay Banon reveals the move stems from a desire to move past lengthy trademark disputes with cloud providers.
Elastic, the $8 billion company behind Elasticsearch and Kibana, surprises the tech industry by returning to open source after nearly four years under proprietary "source available" licenses. This decision directly contradicts the current trend of major enterprise software vendors adopting restrictive copyleft licenses or going fully proprietary. While competitors like HashiCorp and Grafana tighten their software controls, Elastic embraces a more permissive approach once again.
Co-founder and CTO Shay Banon explains that the 2021 switch away from the Apache 2.0 license originally stems from a trademark conflict with Amazon Web Services, not anger over AWS offering a managed Elasticsearch service. AWS acts within its rights under the permissive license, but Elastic takes issue with the "Amazon Elasticsearch" branding, which causes significant customer confusion in the market.
Although Elastic ultimately wins its trademark dispute against AWS, the legal battle consumes valuable time and resources that the company prefers to spend on product development. By reverting to an open source model, Elastic aims to leave these exhausting legal wrangles behind and focus entirely on building better software for its users.