Relicensing: When Your Open Source Tool Turns to the Dark Side
summary
Elasticsearch and Kibana move from Apache 2.0 to SSPL/Elastic License starting with 7.11, then introduce version checks in 7.13–7.14 that break Beats and client libraries; AWS leads a split producing OpenSearch fork released April (beta) / July (GA) and many orgs migrate. Grafana, Loki and Tempo relicense to AGPLv3, creating copyleft network-risk. Two popular npm packages (faker ~2M weekly, colors ~20M weekly) get sabotaged, npm rolls back and GitHub suspends the maintainer. Practical takeaways: prefer permissive licenses, monitor license changes like security, prefer plugins over downstream edits.
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chapters (12)
- 0:00Intro
- 2:15Elasticnvs announcement
- 7:32What is open source
- 10:48Elastic Search case study
- 14:00Open Search fork
- 16:25Grafana example
- 20:35Open source going rogue
- 23:17Case studies
- 23:42Building Open Source
- 25:10Open Source Tips
- 28:16Summary
- 29:14Questions
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