It's your cash they're after
The code which was previously released under Apache 2.0 is now being released under two licences instead: the Elastic Licence and the SSPL.
The Elastic Licence is highly restrictive. It says you can use (but not distribute) the binaries, and only for certain purposes. You can look at the source code, but you can't use it: even if you build your own binaries from source, you can "use the resulting object code only for reasonable testing purposes". Essentially it's a full-blown commercial licence, where the cost for some uses of the software is zero.
The SSPL is less restrictive, allowing you to distribute and modify binaries and source. However if you provide Elasticsearch as part of a cloud offering under this licence, you must then release the source to your *entire* cloud environment, such that someone else could replicate the entire cloud. As such, it becomes a huge risk to any SaaS operator to use Elasticsearch anywhere in their infrastructure under these terms.
Of course, you can buy your way out of the risk by paying a licence to elastic.co. But why do that for Elasticsearch, and not for all the other myriad open source components you rely on in your infrastructure?
I think it's disingenuous for elastic.co to argue that cloud users haven't been contributing back source code patches. Nobody wants to maintain their own private fork - everyone wants their enhancements to be merged upstream to avoid the burden of carrying them forward. Look at Red Hat's contributions to Linux.
The reality is, elastic.co is more interested in getting your cash than your patches.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
