The closed-source topping on the open-source Elasticsearch

Today Elasticsearch (the company, not the software) announced their first commercial, closed-source product, a monitoring plugin for Elasticsearch (the software, not the company – yes I know this is confusing, one might suspect deliberately so). Amongst the raft of press releases there are a few small liberties with the truth, for example describing Elasticsearch (the company) as ‘founded in 2012 by the people behind the Elasticsearch and Apache Lucene open source projects’ – surely the latter project was started by Doug Cutting, who isn’t part of the aforementioned company.

Adding some closed-source dusting to a popular open-source distribution is nothing new of course – many companies do it, especially those that are venture funded – it’s a way of building intellectual property while also taking full advantage of the open-source model in terms of user adoption. Other strategies include curated distributions such as that offered by Heliosearch, founded by Solr creator Yonik Seeley and our partner LucidWorks‘ complete packaged search applications. It can help lock potential clients into your version of the software and your vision of the future, although of course they are still free to download the core and go it alone (or engage people like us to help do so), which helps them retain some control.

It’s going to be interesting to see how this strategy develops for Elasticsearch (for the last time, the company). At Flax we’ve also built various additional software components for search applications – but as we have no external investors to please these are freely available as open-source software, including Luwak our fast stored query engine, Clade a taxonomy/classification prototype and even some file format extractors.

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