No, Elastic X-Pack is not going to be open source – according to Elastic themselves

Elastic are the company founded by the creator of Elasticsearch, Shay Banon. At this time of year they have their annual Elasticon conference in San Francisco and as you might expect a lot of announcements are made during the week of the conference. The major ones to appear this time are that Swiftype, which Elastic acquired last year, has reappeared as Elastic Site Search and that Elastic are opening the code for their commercial X-Pack features.

Shay Banon is always keen to relate how Elasticsearch started as open source and will remain true to that heritage, which is always encouraging to hear. However it’s unfortunate to note that the announcement has been reported by many as ‘X-Pack is now open source’ – and the truth is a little more complicated than that.

Firstly, let’s look at the Elasticsearch core code itself. Yes, this is open source under the Apache 2 license, so you can download it, modify it, fork it, even incorporate it into your own products if you like. However most people would like to keep up with the latest and greatest developments so they’ll want to stick with the ‘official’ stream of updates, and what goes into this is entirely up to Elastic employees as they are the only ones allowed to commit to the codebase. Some measure of control of an open source project is essential of course, but this is certainly not ‘open development’ even though it is ‘open source’. Compare this to Apache Lucene/Solr, where those that are allowed to commit code to the official releases are from a wide variety of organisations (and elected as committers by merit, by a group of other longstanding committers). This distinction is important but makes little difference to most adopters.

Elastic have also for some years produced commercial, closed-source software in addition to Elasticsearch – which they call the X-Pack. To use this code you have to license it, although for some of the features the license is free. The announcement this week is that the source code for the X-Pack will be open and available to read under a Elastic license (which hasn’t yet been made available). As Doug Turnbull of our partner company Open Source Connections writes Be careful: The ‘open source’ Elastic XPack is very different than what most think of as ‘open source'”. To use some of these features you have the source code for in production, you will still need to pay Elastic for a license. If you spot a problem in the source code and submit a patch, you still may end up paying Elastic for the privilege of running it. This is an ‘open core’ model, where the further you move away from the core, the less open and free things become – and as Shay writes this is a key part of their business model.

The final word on this comes from Elastic’s own FAQ on the X-Pack: ” Open Source licensing maintains a strict definition from the Open Source Initiative (OSI). As of 6.3, the X-Pack code will be opened under an Elastic EULA. However, it will not be ‘Open Source’ as it will not be covered by an OSI approved license. “. It’s a shame that this hasn’t been accurately reported.

If you are considering open source search software for your project, contact us for independent and honest advice. We’ve been building open source search applications since 2001.

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