Opening the code of our X-Pack features
This is incredibly user-hostile, and if you read this expecting this is an open-source release, consider yourself clickbaited.<p>Want to contribute to the open-source version of Elasticsearch? Want to ensure you&#x27;re running an open-source database without running a custom EULA past your legal department?<p>Well, make sure that after 6.3 is released, you don&#x27;t accidentally download the default distribution, or browse the official Github repository, or clone from Github, as all of those will have components subject to an as-yet-unreleased, non-OSI-approved EULA (see the final paragraph in <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.elastic.co&#x2F;products&#x2F;x-pack&#x2F;open" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.elastic.co&#x2F;products&#x2F;x-pack&#x2F;open</a>), which may have clauses that trigger liability to Elastic if you accidentally flip a switch or look at the wrong thing. (I am not a lawyer, this is not legal advice, but I shouldn&#x27;t have to be to know if I can use software freely, and I can only guess worst-case scenarios because the terms aren&#x27;t released.)<p>If Elastic were truly committed to transparency, they would release the terms of their new EULA immediately, provide a way to access the head of the open-source portion of the repository without accepting the EULA, and make it clear what the pricing ramifications are if one opts into certain flags or reads certain files in a commercial capacity. (Pricing requires a custom quote, but a quick Google search suggests that the lowest tier in which REST and node-to-node communications are encrypted begins in the tens of thousands of dollars - not the kind of thing you want to take lightly.)<p>Now more than ever, it&#x27;s important that projects like <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;floragunncom&#x2F;search-guard" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;floragunncom&#x2F;search-guard</a> , a free and open-source (Apache 2.0) alternative to some of these X-Pack components, are supported, and that the word is spread around them. (EDIT: Yes, they have commercial components, but those are in a separate repository, so you avoid any entanglements. Why isn&#x27;t Elastic doing the same?)<p>And hopefully, if Elastic doesn&#x27;t maintain a fully-OSS repo, someone will create and maintain a friendly fully-OSS fork that can be combined with third-party software to carry on the legacy of this otherwise excellent database in the right way.