Elastic adds the AGPL licence and becomes open source again

2024-08-29 · Publisher : Elastic · Domain : Cloud & DevOps

On 29 August 2024, Elastic adds the AGPL licence to Elasticsearch and Kibana, alongside SSPL and ELv2. Three years after leaving open source, the vendor can again call its software open source.

### Background On 29 August 2024, Elastic announces that the Elasticsearch and Kibana source code will again be available under an Open Source Initiative-approved licence: the GNU Affero General Public License v3 (AGPL), offered as an additional option. In 2021, the vendor had moved from Apache 2.0 to SSPL and ELv2 following its dispute with AWS, whose competing service, it said, created market confusion. ### Key facts - The choice is additive: users of SSPL or ELv2 are unaffected, nothing is removed. - No change to binary distributions; client libraries remain under Apache 2.0. - Founder Shay Banon explains that the situation has calmed: Amazon is committed to its own fork and market confusion has decreased. - Elastic also highlights the AGPL's value for vector search and generative AI use cases. ### Why it matters After Redis moving away in 2024 and back in 2025, the Elastic case illustrates the pendulum of licences: a vendor tightens to protect itself from hyperscalers, then loosens when the balance of power shifts. For architecture teams, the AGPL is better understood by legal departments than the SSPL, but carries its own obligations when software is offered as a network service. According to Redis's FAQ, the SSPL extends the publication obligation to all the service's management software, which explains the wariness of many lawyers; the AGPL, older and better known, limits the obligation to modified code offered as a network service. ### Takeaway Elastic is the first major vendor to return to an open source licence after a source-available period; Redis follows in May 2025.

Tags : Licence, Open Source, Données, Observabilité