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Comment by usr1106 | Hacker News Reader

Sorry, do not follow that area. Can someone explain to the uninvolved? Who changed from which license to which?

The owner of the code can of course change the license. But in typical open source projects there are 100s of contributors, so changing the license can be anything between a major job and impossible.

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Elastic requires contributors to sign a CLA. Their CLA does not reassign copyright but gives Elastic a license to distribute contributed code without restrictions. [1]

Elastic changed the license for Elasticsearch >7.10.2 from Apache to a more restrictive one to prevent cloud providers like AWS from providing a hosted version.

[1] https://github.com/elastic/elasticsearch/blob/master/CONTRIB...

If there’s only one owner, either through limiting the contributions or through insisting on a CLA, then that owner can do what they like moving forwards. They can’t change things retrospectively, though.

There's been a lot of discussion on this already: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=pastYear&page=0&prefix=fal...

Elastic requires a CLA for contributions: https://www.elastic.co/contributor-agreement

AWS used ElasticSearch; but it was a big headache for Elastic the company to support because it had custom bits which integrated AWS and they used an old version; support issues came in for these versions and it was a pain to manage. (There was also a money issue here).

As a result Elastic the company licensed the new versions of the elastic code with a licence AWS wouldn’t be able to use.

So AWS forked the last Apache* version and continued its development in the Apache license. This is the result of that.

They forked the Apache version. Not GPL.

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