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# Elasticsearch License Change
As a [recovering software attorney](https://www.linkedin.com/in/david-goossen-5015761/), it’s been interesting to watch the fallout from the Elasticsearch license change.

Before coming to my senses and joining Resurface Labs on the Sales and Marketing side, I spent a long time as legal counsel for a software company. It won't surprise anyone to hear that from the time I started in 2000 to when I left the company at the end of 2019, the company’s and the company’s legal department’s views on open source software had changed dramatically. 




## A lawyer's gut reaction
Like most lawyers, my first reaction to the idea of the company including open source products in our software or even using them internally was fear. We put policies in place as to where and how open source software could be used but it was clear that the genie was well out of the bottle by that time. So, as a software company, we drew a line in the sand: No copyleft software, or at least no copyleft software in the products we were developing and distributing. For proprietary software companies, this is still mostly the case. For anyone looking to buy your software or your company, the question is not whether you are using or distributing open source software, it is whether you are using or distributing software licensed under a copyleft software license.

The Elasticsearch search engine was released on February 8, 2010, licensed mostly under the Apache Software License. The Apache license is a permissive license that does not (like a copyleft software license) require derivative works of the software to be distributed using the same license. By selecting this license, Elastic allowed companies with nervous lawyers to use their product without fear. Use of the Apache license undoubtedly increased adoption. However, recently, Elastic announced that future development would be dual-licensed under the Server Side Public License (SSPL)  - a hybrid proprietary/source available license that is effectively a copyleft license when offering the functionality as a service, and the Elastic License. 



## Nobody wins
This is a kind of worst-case scenario. It’s a switch from an open source license to a mostly proprietary license that isn’t acceptable to open source users along with copyleft license characteristics that won’t be acceptable to companies offering Elasticsearch as a service or are just scared of software that is considered copyleft. 

This change upset contributors to the community version of the product who had granted Elastic the right to use their contributions with the expectation that those contributions would continue to be licensed under a permissive (or at least an open source) license. It obviously also upset Amazon Web Services (AWS) who offers Elasticsearch as a service in competition with Elastic’s own hosted offering and the one cited by Elastic as the reason for the change in licensing. 


## When in doubt, fork it out?
Amazon predictably reacted by announcing that they would fork the project to continue development under the Apache license. Some others have followed suit. The end result is that Amazon will be able to continue to do exactly what it was doing while criticizing Elastic for no longer being open source. The impact on other users and Elastic remains to be seen.

Elastic has stated that the change has no effect on most of its users. They state, “Our customers already use the default distribution under the Elastic License, and their use is governed by the terms of their subscription agreement, which continues to grant them access to additional features, access to support, and other Elastic commitments (for example, IP infringement indemnification) as before.” But there is a difference between legal effect and practical effect.  

Some companies have established policies that they will only run Open Source Initiative (OSI) compliant code in production. Because SSPL is not OSI-compliant, these companies are affected even if they are legally still allowed to use the code. Another complaint is that the new licensing scheme is unclear. The Apache license was well established and trusted. The combination of new licenses may leave some companies wondering exactly what their rights and responsibilities are. Everyone will wonder what the next license change might be.


## So what’s a company to do? 
If, as Elastic says, you are an Elastic customer, maybe nothing. If not, you can move to the forked version being run by AWS or any of the other forks that come to pass. Or, you could take this opportunity to evaluate other technologies. 

It so happens that Resurface is an affordable alternative for logging and searching API data with a purpose-built database for storing API data, and a query-first architecture. “Query-first” means we modeled the query behaviors we wanted to achieve first, and then worked backwards to define ingestion and indexing requirements. To accomplish this, we use Trino - the industry-standard open source project formerly known as PrestoSQL - in an innovative way. We’re [promoting this use](https://resurface.io/blog/why_we_love_trino) so that others can build on our experience. [Trino](https://trino.io/), using the Apache License, makes it easy for commercial entities to adopt, is itself based on a fork of open source code that the makers wanted to be governed independently of Facebook. So, it seems these things have a way of working themselves out. Perhaps the same will be true of Elasticsearch. Time will tell. 









<h1>Elasticsearch License Change</h1>
<p>As a <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/david-goossen-5015761/">recovering software attorney</a>, it’s been interesting to watch the fallout from the Elasticsearch license change.</p>
<p>Before coming to my senses and joining Resurface Labs on the Sales and Marketing side, I spent a long time as legal counsel for a software company. It won't surprise anyone to hear that from the time I started in 2000 to when I left the company at the end of 2019, the company’s and the company’s legal department’s views on open source software had changed dramatically. </p>
<h2>A lawyer's gut reaction</h2>
<p>Like most lawyers, my first reaction to the idea of the company including open source products in our software or even using them internally was fear. We put policies in place as to where and how open source software could be used but it was clear that the genie was well out of the bottle by that time. So, as a software company, we drew a line in the sand: No copyleft software, or at least no copyleft software in the products we were developing and distributing. For proprietary software companies, this is still mostly the case. For anyone looking to buy your software or your company, the question is not whether you are using or distributing open source software, it is whether you are using or distributing software licensed under a copyleft software license.</p>
<p>The Elasticsearch search engine was released on February 8, 2010, licensed mostly under the Apache Software License. The Apache license is a permissive license that does not (like a copyleft software license) require derivative works of the software to be distributed using the same license. By selecting this license, Elastic allowed companies with nervous lawyers to use their product without fear. Use of the Apache license undoubtedly increased adoption. However, recently, Elastic announced that future development would be dual-licensed under the Server Side Public License (SSPL)  - a hybrid proprietary/source available license that is effectively a copyleft license when offering the functionality as a service, and the Elastic License. </p>
<h2>Nobody wins</h2>
<p>This is a kind of worst-case scenario. It’s a switch from an open source license to a mostly proprietary license that isn’t acceptable to open source users along with copyleft license characteristics that won’t be acceptable to companies offering Elasticsearch as a service or are just scared of software that is considered copyleft. </p>
<p>This change upset contributors to the community version of the product who had granted Elastic the right to use their contributions with the expectation that those contributions would continue to be licensed under a permissive (or at least an open source) license. It obviously also upset Amazon Web Services (AWS) who offers Elasticsearch as a service in competition with Elastic’s own hosted offering and the one cited by Elastic as the reason for the change in licensing. </p>
<h2>When in doubt, fork it out?</h2>
<p>Amazon predictably reacted by announcing that they would fork the project to continue development under the Apache license. Some others have followed suit. The end result is that Amazon will be able to continue to do exactly what it was doing while criticizing Elastic for no longer being open source. The impact on other users and Elastic remains to be seen.</p>
<p>Elastic has stated that the change has no effect on most of its users. They state, “Our customers already use the default distribution under the Elastic License, and their use is governed by the terms of their subscription agreement, which continues to grant them access to additional features, access to support, and other Elastic commitments (for example, IP infringement indemnification) as before.” But there is a difference between legal effect and practical effect.  </p>
<p>Some companies have established policies that they will only run Open Source Initiative (OSI) compliant code in production. Because SSPL is not OSI-compliant, these companies are affected even if they are legally still allowed to use the code. Another complaint is that the new licensing scheme is unclear. The Apache license was well established and trusted. The combination of new licenses may leave some companies wondering exactly what their rights and responsibilities are. Everyone will wonder what the next license change might be.</p>
<h2>So what’s a company to do?</h2>
<p>If, as Elastic says, you are an Elastic customer, maybe nothing. If not, you can move to the forked version being run by AWS or any of the other forks that come to pass. Or, you could take this opportunity to evaluate other technologies. </p>
<p>It so happens that Resurface is an affordable alternative for logging and searching API data with a purpose-built database for storing API data, and a query-first architecture. “Query-first” means we modeled the query behaviors we wanted to achieve first, and then worked backwards to define ingestion and indexing requirements. To accomplish this, we use Trino - the industry-standard open source project formerly known as PrestoSQL - in an innovative way. We’re <a href="https://resurface.io/blog/why_we_love_trino">promoting this use</a> so that others can build on our experience. <a href="https://trino.io/">Trino</a>, using the Apache License, makes it easy for commercial entities to adopt, is itself based on a fork of open source code that the makers wanted to be governed independently of Facebook. So, it seems these things have a way of working themselves out. Perhaps the same will be true of Elasticsearch. Time will tell. </p>


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