AWS wants to fork Elasticsearch and Kibana
No time right now?
Amazon wants to fork the projects on Elasticsearch and Kibana. This decision follows the announcement that future versions of both tools will no longer be available under an open source license.
Amazon wants to fork the projects of Elasticsearch and Kibana. A fork is the separation of a copy of a project for the purpose of independent further development. The reason: Elastic wants to change their licensing. New versions of Elasticsearch and the front-end application Kibana, which is based on the Elastic Stack, are no longer to be published under the Apache License Version 2.0. Instead, version updates should in future be published under the Elastic License or under the Server Side Public License. In particular, the Server Side Public License apparently requires things which excludes use for many developers within the open source community. In short, both projects are no longer open source.
In one Blog post Amazon announced on Thursday that it wanted to fork the projects. As before, the forks should be under the Apache License V 2.0.
Contents
background
In 2019, AWS released Open Distro, an open distribution for Elasticsearch. The open source distribution should provide developers with all of the Elasticsearch functions they need, including support for network encryption and access control. When developing, AWS has the recommended development practice for open source projects upstream first followed and deliberately avoided forking the software. Instead, they went the way of working with the project maintainers.
Due to the license changes, AWS now wants to go this way. At that time, AWS decided to base its services on the open source projects. According to the blog post, this decision was not made without the willingness to maintain both projects, should this become necessary. Exactly this case has now occurred.
Forks of the versions last released under ALv2
The forks should be based on the last version (V 7.1) of Kibana and Elasticsearch licensed under ALv2. New GitHub repositories are slated to be released in the coming weeks. The ALv2 builds provided by Elastic are then to be replaced in existing open distro distributions. AWS wants to commit itself to maintaining the project in the longer term and to follow best practices recommended for open source projects. The project should be managed in cooperation with the developers involved in the project.
Nothing should change for customers
However, this should not change anything for customers of Amazon’s Elasticsearch Services. None of the 18 Elasticsearch versions currently available via Amazon ES are affected by the license change. In the future, Amazon ES will contain the new forks from Elasticsearch and Kibana. As usual, there will be regular new features, bug fixes and enhancements. According to the blog post, customers should not have to update the client or the code of their applications due to the switch to the forks. The seamless implementation of upgrades will also continue to be guaranteed.
Criticism in both directions
Even if the publication of software under an open source license basically means that anyone can use and fork the code of a project as they wish, there was on the Social news website hackernews In addition to the criticism expressed by Amazon about the license change through Elasticsearch, there was also criticism of AWS ‘approach. Several commentators voiced the allegation that Amazon was using the license for its own benefit, which was not in keeping with the spirit of the open source community.
