Elastic
More info
- Creator
- Shay Banon et al.
- Released
- 2012
- Type
- Software company
- Website
- elastic.co
The company behind Elasticsearch, best known outside its niche for a licence change that ended in a fork.
Shay Banon had built Elasticsearch on top of Lucene as a side project, and in 2012 a company formed around it, incorporated in the Netherlands but run from the US. Add Logstash and Kibana and you had the ELK stack, the default answer to log search for a whole generation of ops teams. The IPO came in 2018.
The trouble was that AWS sold Elasticsearch as a managed service and Elastic saw none of the money. In January 2021 the company dropped the Apache licence for SSPL and a licence of its own, and AWS responded by forking the last open release into OpenSearch. In 2024 Elastic added the AGPL as an option and called itself open source again. The fork, naturally, stayed.