They made a mistake with their original licensing, and now they have corrected it. The comments on this post seem strangely invested in Elastic not fixing their mistake.
Did they made a mistake? It looks to me that they took advantage of Splunk being proprietary. Not many people would use closed Splunk alternative. So they have made an open alternative and everyone loved it and this is what created the community and made them popular. Then they started using their position to force people into their proprietary Basic package because there was no security in the OSS version. That caused many data leaks from unsecured Elastic clusters. Can you imagine MariaDB not having any security by default? Or nginx without ACL? I never cared about Machine Learning, APM, SIEM and their other "products". Then they released "basic security" which was not open and was still pretty limited (e.g. not supporting OpenID). Elastic is big now, listed on the stock exchange so I understand they have to listen to their shareholders. While I don't like Amazon business and I am not their customer, I actually welcome this attempt to finally make a basic usable Elastic really open!
Right but "who is wrong" is what the disagreement is about, and if Elastic made the mistake then arguably it is them who are wrong.
In contrast, a number of people here are acting as if AWS is totally in the wrong. But the only wrong here is Elastic making the mistake and then acting as if the whole thing is AWS' fault. No, if you license your software improperly that's on you, not anyone else.
What about Elastic making the "jerk move" by switching the license under Amazon?
Amazon built the product with the hope that it would continue to be developed with that license. What are they supposed to do with the license change? Just accept whatever Elastic said? I don't think you can blame them for taking the last version where they agreed with the license and continue to use and develop it. Sure, maybe making it open is a bit of a jab back, but even in isolation it makes sense for them.
> What about Elastic making the "jerk move" by switching the license under Amazon?
They’re also switching out the license under everyone else. It’s maybe notable that elastics cloud offering was acquired at some point (it used to be found.io). I used to do elasticsearch consulting and I could name a few customers that will now have to reevaluate their product.
