Elasticsearch B.V. announced a change to the license for the search, analysis and storage platform Elasticsearch , as well as the web interface Kibana . Starting with the release of Elasticsearch 7.11, the project will be migrated from the Apache 2.0 license to the SSPL (Server Side Public License) license, which adds additional usage requirements to ensure the operation of cloud services. For those who are not satisfied with the terms of the SSPL license, a commercial Elastic License is provided. Client libraries will continue to ship under the Apache 2.0 license.
SSPL is already in use by the MongoDB project and provides code modification and distribution, but has not been peer-reviewed by the OSI (Open Source Initiative), license compliance Open Source . Red Hat attorneys categorized the SSPL as nonfree, and the Fedora Project then prohibited the inclusion of packages with products under that license in its repositories.
OSI approval is assessed as unlikely, as there are controversial issues in the license regarding discrimination against certain categories of users (cloud service providers). In addition, the authors of the SSPL did not complete the check and withdrew a previously submitted request to review this license in OSI. The SSPL license is formulated in such a way that, in practice, applications under this license cannot be used in cloud services without purchasing a commercial license, otherwise the code of all components involved in the operation of the cloud service, including third-party ones, will have to be re-licensed under the SSPL.
Recall that the SSPL license is based on the AGPLv3 text, in which changes were made to section 13. The changes are reduced to the addition of the requirement to supply under the SSPL license not only the code of the application itself, but also the source code of all components involved in the provision of the cloud service. According to the opinion of Matthew Garrett, co-director of the Free Software Foundation, this requirement violates compatibility with the GPL and other copyleft licenses. that prohibit the relicensing of someone else’s code.
The reason for changing the license is