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Rishiraj Purohit
Rishiraj Purohit

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Server Side Public Licence

If you have not heard, elasticsearch recently updated their licence to one based on sspl (server side public licence) created and adopted by mongoDB.
https://elastic.co/blog/licensing-change

If you like watching more than reading, I talk about this in my latest video.

Why? 🤔

While there are many reasons for it and most of them are a good read available here: https://www.elastic.co/pricing/faq/licensing but the most important reason is believed to be limiting the abuse by cloud providers.

You may not provide the products to others as a managed service.

Now, this means while as a single user or a company the change in licence should not affect you. It only affects those companies who provide elasticsearch as a managed service.

They go in more details about how AWS is a pain in the *** open-source on their blog here: https://www.elastic.co/blog/why-license-change-AWS

The result

  1. Most cloud providers have contract/agreement with elasticsearch and will be able to provide it as a service.
  2. Amazon, on the other hand, created a fork of the lastest release and will work on creating a new product managed by them.

You might think why Amazon would do such thing but turns out they did try to answer this in very details when they specifically talked about elasticsearch licence changes on their blog available here: https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/opensource/stepping-up-for-a-truly-open-source-elasticsearch/

By the way if you are more interested in weather sspl can be called as open-source licence you may find the blog post by open source initiative interesting: https://opensource.org/node/1099

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