Elastic adds AGPL option to Elasticsearch & Kibana licences

Elastic has announced the addition of the GNU Affero General Public License v3 (AGPL) as an option for users to license the free part of the Elasticsearch and Kibana source code. This announcement makes the source code officially open source under a licence approved by the Open Source Initiative (OSI).

The company stated that the AGPL will be an option alongside the existing Server Side Public License 1.0 (SSPL 1.0) and Elastic License 2.0 (ELv2). This addition aims to provide Elastic’s customers and community the freedom to use, modify, redistribute, and collaborate on the source code under a well-known open source licence.

Shay Banon, founder and chief technology officer for Elastic, commented on the licence addition, stating, “We’re delighted to reintroduce an OSI-approved open source license to Elasticsearch and Kibana. Elastic has always strongly believed in the ethos of open source and the clarity and transparency that it enables.” Banon further added, “Adding AGPL will also enable greater engagement and adoption across our users in areas including vector search, further increasing the popularity of Elasticsearch as the runtime platform for RAG and building GenAI applications.”

According to Elastic, existing users of SSPL or ELv2 will not be affected by the introduction of the AGPL option. There will be no changes to Elastic’s binary distributions, and client libraries will continue to be licensed under Apache 2.0. This ensures continuity for users building applications or plugins on Elasticsearch or Kibana.

AGPL, known for its requirement that modifications to the code be shared with the community, is expected to foster more collaboration and innovation within the open-source community. This move is in line with Elastic’s longstanding support for transparency in software development and community engagement.