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Comment by phd514 | Hacker News Reader

There's been no license change. For years, Elastic has had a set of commercially-licensed features on top of Apache2-licensed Elasticsearch. Within the last year or two, they made those commercially-licensed features source-available. Ironically enough, making the source available seems to have prompted a bunch of claims that they changed their licensing model.

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Elastic mixed open source code with source available code, possibly as a landmine to sue large hosting providers, like Amazon. Amazon's fork includes removing these landmines. Elastic's hands aren't clean.

I have a hard time believing that Amazon's motives are pure. Companies that develop open source software have an incredibly hard time with profitability -- it is no surprise that elastic wants to reduce their own workload by maintaining a single repo for open source and source available code. The "land mines" are cordoned off in one directory. Hard to miss that.

For me the real frustration is Elastic's close tying of client features to server versions, making it impossible e.g. to buy the latest version of Kibana from Elastic and run it against a server managed by Amazon.

As I argued elsewhere in this thread this is completely untrue. Amazon ships an Elastic provided OSS build of Elasticsearch unmodified and as is. There is no fork repo in the opendistro account. There is no ambiguity in the upstream repo (it's a nicely documented code base).

Amazon is shipping and forking the elastic suite of tools, you are describing Elasticsearch itself. When licensing is at a source file level that is ambiguous for sysadmins. I understand you are approaching this as a developer, where it might be very clear.

There is no Amazon fork of the Elasticsearch repository. I looked at their repositories. they are copying the oss build of elasticsearch unmodified, without patches.

As for the licensing; licensing is documented in a 10 line LICENSE.txt. Also, it would be hard to miss the license settings, when you set this up. Hard to miss unless you are a seriously dyslexic and negligent person. In which case, I'd argue the Elastic basic license is the least of your problems.

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