Elastic, the Search AI Company, today announced that it is adding the GNU Affero General Public License v3 (AGPL) as an option for users to license the free part of the Elasticsearch and Kibana source code that is available under Server Side Public License 1.0 (SSPL 1.0) and Elastic License 2.0 (ELv2).

With the addition of AGPL, an open source license approved by the Open Source Initiative (OSI), Elasticsearch and Kibana will be officially considered open source and enable Elastic’s customers and community to use, modify, redistribute, and collaborate on Elastic’s source code under a well-known open source license.

“We’re delighted to reintroduce an OSI-approved open source license to Elasticsearch and Kibana. Elastic has always strongly believed in the ethos of open source and the clarity and transparency that it enables,” said Shay Banon, founder and chief technology officer for Elastic. “Adding AGPL will also enable greater engagement and adoption across our users in areas including vector search, further increasing the popularity of Elasticsearch as the runtime platform for RAG and building GenAI applications.”

The addition of AGPL as a license option does not affect existing users working with either SSPL or ELv2, and there will be no change to Elastic’s binary distributions. Similarly, for users building applications or using plugins on Elasticsearch or Kibana, nothing changes — Elastic’s client libraries will continue to be licensed under Apache 2.0.

For more information, read the blog or see the FAQs here and here.