Simon Willison’s Weblog

Elasticsearch is open source, again (via) Three and a half years ago, Elastic relicensed their core products from Apache 2.0 to dual-license under the Server Side Public License (SSPL) and the new Elastic License, neither of which were OSI-compliant open source licenses. They explained this change as a reaction to AWS, who were offering a paid hosted search product that directly competed with Elastic's commercial offering.

AWS were also sponsoring an "open distribution" alternative packaging of Elasticsearch, created in 2019 in response to Elastic releasing components of their package as the "x-pack" under alternative licenses. Stephen O'Grady wrote about that at the time.

AWS subsequently forked Elasticsearch entirely, creating the OpenSearch project in April 2021.

Now Elastic have made another change: they're triple-licensing their core products, adding the OSI-complaint AGPL as the third option.

This announcement of the change from Elastic creator Shay Banon directly addresses the most obvious conclusion we can make from this:

“Changing the license was a mistake, and Elastic now backtracks from it”. We removed a lot of market confusion when we changed our license 3 years ago. And because of our actions, a lot has changed. It’s an entirely different landscape now. We aren’t living in the past. We want to build a better future for our users. It’s because we took action then, that we are in a position to take action now.

By "market confusion" I think he means the trademark disagreement (later resolved) with AWS, who no longer sell their own Elasticsearch but sell OpenSearch instead.

I'm not entirely convinced by this explanation, but if it kicks off a trend of other no-longer-open-source companies returning to the fold I'm all for it!

# 29th August 2024, 8:50 pm / open-source, elasticsearch, aws

The Cloud and Open Source Powder Keg (via) Stephen O’Grady’s analysis of the Elastic v.s. AWS situation, where Elastic started mixing their open source and non-open source code together and Amazon responded by releasing their own forked “open distribution for Elasticsearch”. World War One analogies included!

# 17th March 2019, 7:08 pm / open-source, aws, elasticsearch

django-zombodb (via) The hardest part of working with an external search engine like Elasticsearch is always keeping that index synchronized with your relational database. ZomboDB is a PostgreSQL extension which lets you create a new type of index backed by an external Elasticsearch cluster. Updated rows will be pushed to the index automatically, and custom SQL syntax can then be used to execute searches. django-zombodb is a brand new library by Flávio Juvenal which integrates ZomboDB directly into the Django ORM, letting you add Elasticsearch-backed functionality with just a few lines of extra configuration. It even includes custom Django migrations for enabling the extension in PostgreSQL!

# 13th February 2019, 10:14 pm / postgresql, django, elasticsearch

elasticsearch-dump. Neat open source utility by TaskRabbit for importing and exporting data in bulk from Elasticsearch. It can copy data from one Elasticsearch cluster directly to another or to an intermediary file, making it a swiss-army knife for migrating data around. I successfully used the “docker run” incantation to execute it without needing to worry about having the correct version of Node.js installed.

# 9th April 2018, 10:10 pm / docker, nodejs, elasticsearch

Building a Full-Text Search App Using Docker and Elasticsearch. Deep, comprehensive tutorial from Patrick Triest showing how to use docker-compose to run three containers (Node API, nginx static content, elasticsearch) and then use that to build a neat Vue.js web search UI against 100 books from Project Gutenberg.

# 1st February 2018, 3:41 pm / docker, nodejs, elasticsearch

gillyb/sensitive: A native desktop version of the kibana sense plugin. I love using the Sense UI for developing against Elasticsearch, but it’s infuriatingly hard to obtain these days. You can install it as a Kibana plugin but I work with multiple Elasticsearch instances and I don’t want to have to get it installed on all of them. Until recently I was using a Chrome extension for it, but that’s now been disabled as containing malware and removed from the Chrome extension store. I’ve now switched to Sensitive, which packages Sense up as a native OS X application using Electron.

# 4th November 2017, 7:35 pm / elasticsearch, electron

elasticsearch: Percolator. Another fascinating elasticsearch feature: Percolator lets you register searches with your elasticsearch cluster, then pass in a document and have the matching query IDs returned. It’s an upside down search engine. I’m sure there are some very neat things you could build with this, I just haven’t figured out what they are just yet.

# 8th February 2011, 11:16 pm / elasticsearch, search, recovered

ElasticSearch memcached module. Fascinating idea: the ElasticSearch search server provides an optional memcached protocol plugin for added performance which maps simple HTTP to memcached. GET is mapped to memcached get commands, POST is mapped to set commands. This means you can use any memcached client to communicate with the search server.

# 15th May 2010, 10:17 am / elasticsearch, http, memcached, protocol, recovered

Search Engine Time Machine. Detailed explanation of how ElasticSearch provides high availability, through clever sharding and replication strategies and configurable gateways for long-term persistent storage.

# 17th February 2010, 10:32 pm / elasticsearch, highavailability, scaling, search

ElasticSearch: Your Data, Your Search. A neat example of how ElasticSearch’s schemaless indexes and native JSON support make it ridiculously easy to index different types of data and run queries across them.

# 12th February 2010, 3:22 pm / elasticsearch, java, search, schemaless, json

Elastic Search (via) Solr has competition! Like Solr, Elastic Search provides a RESTful JSON HTTP interface to Lucene. The focus here is on distribution, auto-sharding and high availability. It’s even easier to get started with than Solr, partly due to the focus on providing a schema-less document store, but it’s currently missing out on a bunch of useful Solr features (a web interface and faceting are the two that stand out). The high availability features look particularly interesting. UPDATE: I was incorrect, basic faceted queries are already supported.

# 11th February 2010, 6:33 pm / search, scaling, rest, lucene, java, elasticsearch, json, http, sharding, solr