For years Elasticsearch and Kibana, the search and analytics products built by Elastic, shipped under the permissive Apache License version 2.0. On January 14, 2021, Elastic founder and CEO Shay Banon announced in a post titled “Doubling down on open” that the company would stop releasing new versions of those products under Apache 2.0 and instead dual-license them under the Server Side Public License (SSPL) and the proprietary Elastic License, taking effect before the 7.11 release. Neither license is approved by the Open Source Initiative, so the practical effect was to move Elasticsearch and Kibana from open source into the source-available category.
Elastic framed the change as protecting its investment in software it developed and distributed for free against cloud providers that offered it as a managed service without contributing proportionally back. The unnamed but obvious target was Amazon Web Services, which ran a popular Amazon Elasticsearch Service and against which Elastic had filed a trademark complaint in 2019. The “doubling down on open” branding drew sharp criticism, since the move actually reduced the freedoms users had under the prior license; critics called it a proprietary license dressed in open source clothing.
AWS responded within days. In a post titled “Stepping up for a truly open source Elasticsearch,” AWS announced it would create and maintain an Apache 2.0-licensed fork of Elasticsearch and Kibana, building on the last ALv2 codebase at version 7.10. Having already shipped Open Distro for Elasticsearch since 2019, AWS turned that effort into a full community fork, which became the OpenSearch project: a permissively licensed, independently governed continuation of the code Elastic had relicensed.
The split fragmented the ecosystem. Users and downstream distributors who needed an OSI-approved open source license migrated to OpenSearch, while Elastic continued developing Elasticsearch under SSPL and the Elastic License. For several years the search community ran two parallel lineages descended from a common ancestor, a vivid demonstration of how a permissive original license makes forking not just possible but, when a vendor restricts the terms, almost inevitable.
The story did not end in permanent division. On August 29, 2024, Shay Banon published “Elasticsearch is Open Source, Again,” announcing that Elastic would add the OSI-approved GNU Affero General Public License (AGPL) as a license option alongside the Elastic License and SSPL. Banon wrote that he was “literally jumping up and down with excitement” and that the company had never stopped believing in open source, explaining that the conditions that prompted the 2021 change, particularly the confusion AWS’s offering had caused, had since improved. The return restored an open source option for Elasticsearch, though OpenSearch by then had its own momentum, and the episode stands as one of the defining licensing controversies of the cloud era.