Why AWS Is Forking Elasticsearch and Kibana

Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols writes at ZDNet:

When Elastic, makers of the open-source search and analytic engine Elasticsearch, went after Amazon Web Services (AWS) by changing its license from the open-source Apache 2.0-license ALv2) to the non-open-source friendly Server Side Public License, I predicted “we’d soon see AWS-sponsored Elasticsearch and Kibana forks.” The next day, AWS tweeted it “will launch new forks of both Elasticsearch and Kibana based on the latest Apache 2.0 licensed codebases.” Well, that didn’t take long!

In a blog post, AWS explained that since Elastic is no longer making its search and analytic engine Elasticsearch and its companion data visualization dashboard Kibana available as open source, AWS is taking action. “In order to ensure open source versions of both packages remain available and well supported, including in our own offerings, we are announcing today that AWS will step up to create and maintain an ALv2-licensed fork of open-source Elasticsearch and Kibana… AWS brings years of experience working with these codebases, as well as making upstream code contributions to both Elasticsearch and Apache Lucene, the core search library that Elasticsearch is built on — with more than 230 Lucene contributions in 2020 alone… We’re in this for the long haul, and will work in a way that fosters healthy and sustainable open source practices — including implementing shared project governance with a community of contributors…”

Yet another company, Logz.io, a cloud-monitoring company, and some partners have announced that it will launch a “true” open source distribution for Elasticsearch and Kibana.

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