Elastic announces the return of open source licensing for Elasticsearch and Kibana, adding AGPL as an option alongside existing licenses. This change reinforces our long-standing commitment to open so...

[D.N.A] Elasticsearch and Kibana can be called Open Source again. It is hard to express how happy this statement makes me. Literally jumping up and down with excitement here. All of us at Elastic are. Open source is in my DNA. It is in Elastic DNA. Being able to call Elasticsearch Open Source again is pure joy.

[LOVE.] The tl;dr is that we will be adding AGPL as another license option next to ELv2 and SSPL in the coming weeks. We never stopped believing and behaving like an open source community after we changed the license. But being able to use the term Open Source, by using AGPL, an OSI approved license, removes any questions, or fud, people might have.

[Not Like Us] We never stopped believing in Open Source at Elastic. I never stopped believing in Open Source. I’m going on 25 years and counting as a true believer. So why the change 3 years ago? We had issues with AWS and the market confusion their offering was causing. So after trying all the other options we could think of, we changed the license, knowing it would result in a fork of Elasticsearch with a different name and a different trajectory. It’s a long story.

  • grue@lemmy.worldEnglish
    5·
    2 months ago

    And which parts does the AGPL violate? Because that’s what the article is about: it becoming available under the AGPL.

    • LalSalaamComrade@lemmy.mlEnglish
      34·
      2 months ago

      Section 13 of AGPLv3 and SSPLv1 have different scopes and coverage. Also, from the Stack Exchange - SSPL and the Open Source Definition

      License compatibility is already clear: as a copyleft license, the SSPL is incompatible with other copyleft licenses such as GPL or AGPL, but like the GPL or AGPL is one-way compatible with permissive licenses such as MIT, BSD, or Apache 2.0.

      More about AGPL violations can be read in the same link I’ve mentioned above.

      • Captain Beyond@linkage.ds8.zone
        4·
        2 months ago

        Assuming they own the copyright (which I believe they do, since they were able to relicense it to begin with) they can absolutely offer it under a dual licensing arrangement even if the licenses are incompatible. It would only be an issue if other peoples’ AGPLv3 licensed code was in there, but as it is not the only copyright they would theoretically be violating is their own, which is literally not possible.

        Dual licensing under a free software license and proprietary EULA is a common business model, especially when the free software license is a strong copyleft like the AGPL, since the proprietary licensors do not have to abide by certain conditions that free license users have to.