Elastic Changes Licensing

Elastic, the company behind Elasticsearch and Kibana, announced a change in licensing for future versions of their products from Apache 2.0 to the SSPL and Elastic License. This move was intended to restrict cloud providers from offering managed services of their software.

Significance

This licensing change directly triggered the creation of OpenSearch, as it eliminated the permissively licensed, truly open-source version of Elasticsearch that many users and cloud providers depended on.