In a blog post, CEO Shay Bannon justifies why Elasticsearch no longer appears as free software. Amazon is solely responsible for this step, and its behavior towards the developers of the search engine is unacceptable. Now Elastic has to stand up to the company as the market leader.
Specifically, the ie is that AWS offers Elasticsearch without Amazon cooperating with Elastic. For example, the name Amazon Elasticsearch is a trademark infringement, all attempts to clarify the matter with the company have failed and finally made it necessary to file a lawsuit.
Amazon Elasticsearch: Fork or no fork?
Further, AWS has been repeatedly touted its services as having a collaboration with Elastic, but it doesn’t exist. Again and again this confuses the community. Amazon’s own distribution for Elasticsearch, where parts of the code were taken from the developer’s commercial features, caused even more irritation.
Shay Bannon repeatedly emphasizes that nothing is different for users – and he is not opposed to cooperation with cloud providers, as long as it is in line with the open source principles of transparency, collaboration and openness. In fact, the CEO has often publicly accused Amazon of violating these principles.
The license change will take place with the upcoming version 7.11, from which the Elastic License and the Server Side Public License (SSPL) are available for selection. All the accusations against AWS can be found in Elastic’s blog post. iX has asked Amazon for a statement on the allegations, which, however, was not yet available at the time of publication of the report.