Fork that noise, says cloud giant amid licensing drama Share Copy Amazon Web Services has responded to Elastic adopting more-restrictive software licenses by simply forking the latter's Elasticsearch and Kibana products with an open-source license. This basically means developers have a choice: use software developed by Elastic that has a somewhat limited license, or an open-source offshoot developed by a gigantic technology company that also offers it as the Amazon Elasticsearch Service in the cloud. Last week, Elastic announced it will drop the open-source Apache 2.0 licence for its ElasticSearch and Kibana projects, and instead use the non-open-source Server Side Public License (SSPL) and Elastic licence in a dual-licensing approach. It said it may add provisions to have the code revert to the Apache 2.0 licence after a period of up to five years.