Re:AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana
by liuliu on Friday January 22, 2021 @01:46AM
(#25869098)
Apache 2 license doesn’t allow you to relicense. So absorbing changes from AWS’ fork won’t be clear or easy as many in this thread suggest.
Re:AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana
by brasetvik on Friday January 22, 2021 @11:15AM
(#25872913)
Apache 2 license explicitly does grant the right to sublicense. See §2.
Re:AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana
by liuliu on Friday January 22, 2021 @11:47AM
(#25873269)
Honestly I don't know how that works. My understanding is that you cannot move existing ASL code under a different terms other than ASL unless you are the copyright holder. All modifications you done can be subject to whatever terms you liked. This seems to match what they said http://www.apache.org/foundation/license-faq.html#Distribute...
I think this important bit is sublicense v.s. relicense, where in sublicense case, you have to retain the original terms carried for the original code.
Now, Elastic relicensed the whole software stack under SSDL. So to integrate any parts AWS done, they need to license Elasticsearch back to some mixture of SSDL and ASL, which would be weird.
Looking at the various projects at https://github.com/opendistro-for-elasticsearch/, the most prominent ones seem to only have a handful of somewhat active developers, almost two years after launch.
If AWS hires a lot of people to work full time on their ASL2-licensed Elasticsearch and Kibana forks, then ... that's not necessarily _just_ bad for Elastic? I doubt Elastic execs thought AWS would just fall over and discontinue something that's probably billions in revenue at this point. If AWS actually starts contributing code beyond trivial bug fixes, code Elastic can legally fold into their own Elasticsearch (via the ASL2-licensed fork) if it's good enough, then ... good for both?