Also not a lawyer, but I find the language in the license pretty interesting and ambiguous choice of words.
> [...] where obtaining access to the Elastic Software or the features and functions of the Elastic Software is a primary reason or substantial motivation for users of the SaaS Offering to access and/or use the SaaS Offering
It seems like you can still offer Kibana to end customers, but I wonder where the cutoff line for "substantial motivation" ends.
Yea I read that as if E/K is used to power your backend analytics for your dev team we're OK but using for client facing reports, a key feature of your application, is blocked.
Even worse, Elasticsearch is a great product for adding "search" to your webapp. I don't see how integrating it doesn't run afoul of:
Making the functionality of the Program or modified version available to third parties as a service includes, without limitation, enabling third parties to interact with the functionality of the Program or modified version remotely through a computer network...
I'm not sure if people are really confused about this or sowing FUD. Using Elasticsearch to search your own webapp is not providing Elasticsearch as a service. It's using Elasticsearch to provide functionality in your application.
Providing Elasticsearch as a service means allowing people to upload their own data and giving them an Elasticsearch instance to search it.
There's some grey area where it's a question if you're providing an application with a search feature or just hosting Elasticsearch. Like if you provide a way to upload logs and then search them that's Elasticsearch as a service. But if you provide an automated upload, is that enough?
> ...if you provide a way to upload logs and then search them that's Elasticsearch as a service
Yes, and if you let your internal company blogging platform ping a service upon every new post, which then feeds that post into Elastic so blog posts across your company are searchable?
I suspect one way to avoid this would be “buy a commercial license” (or use Amazon’s fork if you’re so minded), but if you’re using Elastic’s open source offerings — I’d be careful about licensing anything under SSPL, whatever your intentions are.
It can be, they just chose not to (with ulterior motives or not, I cannot say.)
For my side project, I am using a dual-licensed MIT/Apache (your choice) but with an exclusion which prohibits companies like AWS from offering it alone as a service. Here's a copy of the (quite human-readable) license:
I think a more charitable interpretation of Elastic's motives in the re-licensing would be to view them the same as your motives for your side project -- allow free use to anyone except those wanting to offer it as a hosted service. You say that you've licensed your side project with MIT and Apache2 but with an exclusion. In other words, it's neither MIT nor Apache2 and it's unclear how your exclusion would hold up legally (hopefully well!). At Elastic's scale, uncertainty over a license is too risky, so I'm sure they paid their lawyers $$$ to ensure that the SSPL would hold up in the scenarios that were important to them.
But I think it's unfortunate that companies end up with licenses like SSPL which are lengthy, not legible to non-lawyers (see this thread) and more importantly ambiguous in favor of the SSPL-software-provider. It's only natural, that's what lawyers are hired to do, after all! But I think there are other options (be ambiguous in favor of the opposing party, or build upon existing licenses)
If you aren't modifying the ElasticSearch source code, then you don't need to care about any of this conversation at all.
If you add search to your webapp using ElasticSearch, you typically would not be modifying it, and so any source distribution burden that could possibly be compelled from you in a worst-case scenario would be for the unmodified source code that you freely downloaded from a public website. No local modifications? No violation of terms. End of line.
While that's a slight risk of having more burden than not having to provide that source code, it's not like it contains anything proprietary, because you probably aren't modifying it anyways — and once you divulge that source, it's proof that you not only did not violate terms, but could even request legal fees.
So whether or not this search usage would qualify, which can only be definitively decided in a court of law, your actual risk of harm and exposure is none whatsoever — unless you have proprietary patches to ElasticSearch and you aren't already sharing them openly in a GitHub fork. (I'm not your lawyer, etc.)
> using for client facing reports, a key feature of your application, is blocked.
That seems a very pessimistic / overly conservative interpretation to me. They are clearly shooting for people selling Elastic itself as a hosted service here. Your client facing report being "Elastic Software or the features and functions of the Elastic Software" is unlikely to fall into "reasonable interpretation" space IMHO.
> [...] where obtaining access to the Elastic Software or the features and functions of the Elastic Software is a primary reason or substantial motivation for users of the SaaS Offering to access and/or use the SaaS Offering
It seems like you can still offer Kibana to end customers, but I wonder where the cutoff line for "substantial motivation" ends.