Oversize #17: When Elastic took on Amazon in moonshot

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Editor's note: The start of the new year saw Elastic, makers of open source search and analytics engine Elasticsearch and data visualization tool Kibana, take on Amazon Web Services, the world's leading cloud service provider, with about a third of global market share. Elasticsearch was first released in 2010 by Shay Banon, who went on to co-found Elastic in 2012. It is often used alongside two other open-source projects by Elastic—Logstash and Kibana—to form the ELK Stack. On 14 January, Elastic announced that the company is moving its Apache 2.0-licensed source code in Elasticsearch and Kibana to be dual licensed under Server Side Public License (SSPL) and the Elastic License. More on this in a bit. The company explained that the licence change will ensure its community and customers free and open access to use, modify, redistribute, and collaborate on the code while protecting their continued investments in developing these products. Essentially, the move is not to restrict its users and customers in any manner but to restrict the cloud service providers from taking its products to offer them as a managed …