Ah, I see. The key part above is "to third parties". If you're using ubicloud to provide a managed/hosted service for yourself, or your company, that's wonderful. You could even be a massive organization and do that. It's just that you are not providing the managed service to other parties such as your customers - essentially, that you're not a hosting provider re-selling the software.

The ambiguity is in who is a third party. If I am a small digital agency and I have a hetzner server with ubicloud and I use it to host my clients websites, e.g 10 small businesses pay me $200/m each to host their wordpress websites, are they third parties? Can I do this?

This, with virtual certainty, permitted. I am a founder of Ubicloud, so, I suppose you can take that to the bank.

For guidelines, see:

https://www.elastic.co/licensing/elastic-license/faq

Text:

I'm using Elasticsearch to put a search box on my cat-picture SaaS product.

This is permitted under ELv2. Meow!

I'm a contractor setting up Elasticsearch and Kibana for my clients to use internally.

This is permitted under ELv2, because you are not providing the software as a managed service.

My cat-picture SaaS product shows view-only Kibana dashboards of analytics on searches and views.

This is permitted under ELv2. The use of Kibana in this case is limited and this does not represent access to a substantial portion of the functionality of Kibana.

I am a Managed Service Provider (MSP) running Elasticsearch and Kibana for my customers.

If your customers do not access Elasticsearch and Kibana, this is permitted under ELv2. If your customers do have access to substantial portions of the functionality of either Elasticsearch and Kibana as part of your service, this may not be permitted.

I provide Elasticsearch and Kibana as a service, where my customers have direct access to substantial portions of the Elasticsearch APIs and Kibana UI.

This use is not permitted under the ELv2. Please reach out to us to discuss your options.

If you have questions about your specific scenario, please reach out to us at [email protected].

Because, although they speak against AWS outrageous margins, they want a monopoly to secure high margins as well.

If they open sourced, they'd need to compete against copy cats.

This is understandable. They need to protect themselves and maybe become profitable.

I would just prefer they didn't pretend to be so much different from AWS, Azure or GCP. This isn't open. The source is publicized, but not open. They discriminate, which goes against the essence of the open source principle.