AWS wouldn't, I presume, touch the 7.11 dual-licensed Elasticsearch release with a ten-foot pole. They would have to hard-fork it here on, or Gold+ partner with Elastic.co to sell Elasticsearch Service under the relatively more permissive Elastic License.

what do you mean by "hard-fork" ? I thought that open distro is "hard-fork" but licence stayed apache

https://github.com/opendistro-for-elasticsearch/

Opendistro is primarily a set of plugins for the stock APL ES distribution, not a fork of elasticsearch proper.

I've just checked, you are right!

Correct me if I'm wrong, AWS ES service still uses ES free licence but they've re-written the plugins so they won't use ES and pay ES fee?

With new licence, AWS won't be able to use ES as SaaS?

As things stand: Yes, to both your questions.

there is this twitter user that claims that non-elastic employees can't contribute[1]. I wish somebody could summarise this romance between AWS vs Elastic for simpler people because I can't catch up :(

[1] https://twitter.com/_msw_/status/1349939801445658624

I didn't say that non-Elastic employees could not contribute. I said that they cannot become maintainers.

Non-elastic pull requests are merged, as I mentioned in [1].

[1] https://twitter.com/_msw_/status/1349814591501475840

more like the difference between GPL and Affero GPL.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affero_General_Public_License

Long but may be helpful: https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/understanding-open-sour...

Not an expert but usually F/OSS licenses are mainly about:

- Patent grants (either grants patent-use or doesn't)

- Copyleft (should modifications be open sourced. ex: AGPL is the strongest FOSS copyleft, whilst SSPL builds on it to make it even more stronger)

- Copyright (owners who are licensing the code)

- Warranty and Liability

- Terms of use (ex: FOSS licenses don't enforce restrictions on commercial use like CommonsClause does)

Ref: https://choosealicense.com/