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Elastic Return To Open Source

Elastic have broken one of the biggest observability stories of the year, announcing that that they were making their flagship ElasticSearch product available under a license which conforms to the requirements of the Open Source Initiative.

In recent times major vendors such as Terraform and Redis that have both incurred the wrath of the Open Source community by flipping over to proprietary licensing models. Elastic have now announced a stunning reversal of this trend by committing to place the ElasticSearch code base under a GNU AGPL licence (the same license as used by Grafana). In a highly effusive post on the Elastic blog, CTO and Founder Shay Banon declared that “open source is in my DNA” and revealed that the company had even healed their rift with the former arch-enemy, AWS.

In retrospect, one could maybe see hints that Elastic were laying the groundwork for a reconciliation with the Open Source community. Initiatives such as open-sourcing the Elastic Profiler and declaring their full commitment to the OpenTelemetry Project could be seen as harbingers of a strategic shift. Despite this, few would have predicted a full 180 degree turn back to the Open Source model.

Clearly, within the community, there will be some trust issues to be resolved. Having apparently pulled up the ladder once before, Elastic will have to work hard to get the community back on board. One factor in their favour though, is the opportunity to leverage the power and sophistication of the current ElasticSearch code base - which has benefited from substantial investment and boasts a number of leading-edge capabilities.

This is an announcement which has come as a great surprise and there is a lot to unpack from Shay Banon's impassioned statement. His position is that Elastic were always committed to the open source ethos but were left with no alternative by Amazon's apparently cannibalistic methods. Ultimately, if you feel that Amazon have parked a tank on your lawn, then you may well feel an existential threat and the need for self-preservation may well override other concerns.

The big question, is which direction does the Amazon ship now take. Whereas Grafana have have adopted the strategy of building out a high performance and broad-based observability platform, Elastic seem to have specialised more in search and AI capabilities. Will Elastic continue on this path or will they they reposition themselves as a mainstream full-stack provider.

Elastic CTO Shay Banon has said that he expects the move to be greeted with cynicism in some quarters and this will inevitably be the case. Our take is that this is a really positive development and maybe even a cause for celebration.

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