Our first response when hearing of the license change was that at least Elastic didn t invent yet another weird new license, and instead grabbed one off the shelf. Customer legal departments can rest easy that they won t have to vet yet another strange licensing offshoot. And secondly, after we started Googling all the details, cookie tracking triggered a wave of save on the cost of Elasticsearch log analytics ads from ChaosSearch.
It s the latest in a saga that refuses to end: can open source databases avoid becoming victims of their own success? It dates back to MongoDB s 2018 embrace of the SSPL, followed by Redis, CockroachDB, and Confluent announcing their own quasi-open source licenses du jour. Meanwhile, stalwart MariaDB retained the classic GPL license to keep the so-called cloud predators away for its core engine, but also used BSL for some other parts of their platform such as MaxScale. There s so much sturm und drang in this field. Like here and here. But