Elastic reverts Elasticsearch and Kibana to open source with new AGPL license option

Elastic has announced that Elasticsearch, a popular search AI platform, and Kibana, a data visualization and exploration platform, are open source again. In January 2021, Elastic had re-licensed their Apache 2.0 code for these platforms to dual licenses under Server Side Public License (SSPL) and Elastic License (ELv2), neither of which are recognized as open-source licenses. This change was prompted by issues with AWS and market confusion caused by their offerings, according to Elastic.

Elastic now plans to add AGPL as another license option alongside ELv2 and SSPL in the coming weeks. They emphasize that they have continued to operate like an open-source community despite the previous license change. Existing users of Elasticsearch can continue without changes, while new users will have the option to choose the open-source AGPL license.