If you can`t win them - lead them

Probably that’s how Amazon decided to make its ElasticSearch fork. Challengers of open source businesses face new challenges that their ancestors (like Red Hat) did not. Particularly with product appropriation from cloud providers.

In general, an interesting situation in which personal preferences remain not on the cloud side. This situation has been developing for a long time, and it produced not by Elastic. As early as 2018, MongoDB released a new license of its development - SSPL which is a modified AGPL 3.0.

The only and really important limitation of the license is if a consumer creates a service based on the product. In such a case, a consumer must either publish all source codes or buy a corporate license. Simply put, it does not allow cloud providers to earn money on a free (optional) open-source product without giving anything in return back to the product.

And then it started… Part of the community raise in arms against this, generally good decision, and launched its own MongoDB with SQL and blackjack. OSI acknowledged the SSPL as a proprietary and restrictive license. As a result, the MongoDB API-compliant service introduced by AWS supports only version 3.x released following the previous license.

After that less promoted and well-known, but rather popular solutions - Graylog and CockroachDB have switched to the new license. By the way, with about the same result, in the end. Now it was Elactic’s turn to change the license.

The war between the search engine developer and the cloud giant has been going on for quite a long time. First AWS released a free and open-source version of the extensions for ElasticSearch. While Elastic company sells it as part of the enterprise license. Elastic did not find a better solution but to change the license for all its products. AWS announced the creation of its fork of ElastiSearch in return.

This is a logical decision from AWS’s point of view — managed ES service sold with an excellent added value compared to regular EC2 instances and very popular. Therefore, unlike a MongoDB-compatible service, AWS can not simply, for example, postpone the release and redo it from scratch. No one will chop their head with a chicken carrying golden eggs.

I wonder what the consequences will be for each of the market players. I think that in fact, AWS will develop its fork to add features related to search, while Elastic will continue to develop security-related functionality. And products will not compete directly especially.

But in this example, it is the case, the precedent. And I don’t rule out that the war is not over and soon we will see new battles.