Amazon Web Services (AWS) is taking a fork to the popular “open source” Elasticsearch database search engine in the latest tit-for-tat skirmish with that platform’s initial developer Elastic. The move comes on the heels of Elastic changing up the licensing models for its Elasticsearch and Kibana platforms in a move that specifically targeted AWS’ hosting of that platform.

Elastic earlier this month warned that it would be changing up the licensing model for Elasticsearch and Kibana. This change is from the long-standing Apache 2.0 model to a dual licensed model under the Server Side Public License (SSPL) and the “Elastic License.”

Company CEO and Founder Shay Bannon explained that the move “has no impact on the overwhelming majority of our user community who use our default distribution for free. It also has no impact on our cloud customers or self-managed software customers.”

Bannon boldly noted that the move targeted AWS and its hosted Amazon Elasticsearch Service and specifically how AWS has been using the Elasticsearch code to support a new service.

“Our license change is aimed at preventing companies from taking our Elasticsearch and Kibana products and providing them directly as a service without collaborating with us,” Bannon noted in a blog post. “Our license change comes after years of what we believe to be Amazon/AWS misleading and confusing the community – enough is enough.”

Bannon’s missive noted that the issue stems from AWS launching its Amazon Elasticsearch platform in 2015, which it felt violated the Elasticsearch trademark Bannon registered in 2011. He explained that this has caused confusion in the market and that failed negotiations with AWS forced Elastic to file a lawsuit against Amazon.

“They have been doing things that we think are just NOT OK since 2015, and it has only gotten worse,” Bannon wrote. “If we don’t stand up to them now, as a successful company and leader in the market, who will?”

AWS defended its use of Elasticsearch and cited its development of the Open Distro for Elasticsearch in 2019, in which it said it “followed the recommended open source development practice of ‘upstream first.’” That platform provides AWS customers and developers with an Elasticsearch distribution, and that all code changes were sent as upstream pull requests.

To counter Elastic's licensing change, AWS stated that it plans to “step up to create and maintain a ALv2-licensed fork of open source Elasticsearch and Kibana.”

The move to “fork” Elasticsearch and Kibana is a bold choice in the open source world, which traditionally has had an adverse reaction to the forking of open source projects. This typically means that a vendor will add code or features to an existing project that alters the general scope or direction of that project.

Amazon’s relationship with the open source community is not something new, and it was dinged by The New York Times in a story in late 2019. The story noted that a number of software companies have struggled to prevent Amazon from taking core pieces of their open source platforms and packaging them as services that Amazon ties into its AWS platform, and leans heavily on the Elastic angle.

Amazon took exception to the article, noting it was “skewed and misleading,” and that “the reporter had a story he wanted to write and didn’t let the facts get in the way of his story. He ignored most of what we shared with him, left out many of the positive partner comments various partners shared with him, and conflated various software terms.”

The back-and-forth drew considerable commentary across the Twitter-verse as well as several blogs on both sides of the often contentious open source debate.

Patrick Moorhead, president and principal analyst at Moor Insights & Strategy, in an email to SDxCentral tied to The New York Times article cited the dynamic nature of the open source ecosystem.

“The [New York Times] article demonstrated that the author doesn’t have a full grasp on how open source works,” Moorhead wrote. “Open source is all about taking a source technology and if improvements are made to it, then sending those upstream. Companies like AWS, RedHat, and even SiFive in silicon, package the base technology up, make it usable by the intended customer, support, and charge for all of it. Raw open source technologies aren’t typically ready for an enterprise audience and needs TLC to make it usable.”

Some of AWS’ rivals have attempted to take advantage of the kerfuffle.

Google, for instance, last year announced its Open Source Ecosystem project as a way to tighten work with open source software vendors. Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian noted that many of those vendors were being run over by “cloud providers.”

“Recently the open source community has found that cloud providers are not partnering with them but attempting to take away their ability to monetize open source,” Kurian said. We at Google do not believe that is good for customers, for the development community, or for software innovation.”