Elasticsearch 7.10.2 is now available for provisioning on Qbox, so if you want to take advantage of the features such as rank features, better shard default, and adaptive replica selection, log in to your dashboard. As always, review the breaking changes and release notes, and test in a non-production environment before going live. Note: This latest version is available only to customers on our next-gen platform. This could be a good opportunity for our Legacy Qbox customers to take advantage of the goodness of Next-Gen including role-based access control. If you need help with migration, just fill out a support ticket and a support engineer will be glad to help.

The SSPL backstory

This version was widely available in the open source community a year ago -- so why did it take us so long? Well, if you have been following the quasi-religious war in the OSS world surrounding Server-Side Public Licenses (SSPL) and their derivatives such as the Elastic License, it has not been clear that we would be able to release. The super-short story is that Elastic, the company that created Elasticsearch, has been seeking to change the widely understood and tested Apache 2 license to a license that is not accepted by the open source community. The so-called "source available" (as opposed to "open source") agreements haven’t been tested in courts. Of course, In Elastic’s defense, the code is still open and there is still a free community version. However, many open source purists, as well as their legal teams, are resistant to the SSPL’s language and the missing track record in court. Other commercial open source vendors, such as MongoDB and Redis Labs, have also embraced SSPL. Elastic justified the move by objecting to Amazon Web Services’ managed Elasticsearch service without a corresponding contribution befitting their massive revenue. AWS responded by first creating the Open Distro for Elasticsearch and then forking Elasticsearch into a project named OpenSearch. The latter places the two projects on a separate plane entirely and threatens to splinter the community. Competing lawsuits were filed, and settlement talks are ongoing.

Back To The New Version

For the record, our company has been in contact with both parties. We rely on a peaceful co-existence with both parties. We see no reason why our company would be the target of any litigation. Now, let’s go back to the new version available on Qbox. This is the last pre-fork version on the Apache 2 license. We have been making careful plans (with the advice of counsel, of course) to accommodate the legal obligation, to ensure our customers have access to the most advanced and stable versions available, to be a constructive member of the OSS community, and to stay out of any adversarial situations. We are currently unable to share those plans with you because the details are still being finalized, but until we can do so, keep in mind the following:

All versions of Elasticsearch deployed on our service are Apache 2 licensed.
There is no software operating under a proprietary license being hosted by Qbox without permission.

So, keep building, and we’ll keep building as well.

Qbox to join forces with Instaclustr. Read about it on our blog post here.

Elasticsearch v 7.10.2 now available on Qbox