Our first response when hearing of the license change was that at least Elastic didn't invent yet another weird new license, and instead grabbed one off the shelf. Customer legal departments can rest easy that they won't have to vet yet another strange licensing offshoot. And secondly, after we started Googling all the details, cookie tracking triggered a wave of "save on the cost of Elasticsearch log analytics" ads from ChaosSearch. It's the latest in a saga that refuses to end: can open source databases avoid becoming victims of their own success? It dates back to MongoDB's 2018 embrace of the SSPL, followed by Redis, CockroachDB, and Confluent announcing their own quasi-open source licenses du jour. Meanwhile, stalwart MariaDB retained the classic GPL license to keep the so-called cloud predators away for its core engine, but also used BSL for some other parts of their platform such as MaxScale. There's so much sturm und drang in this field. Like here and here. But don't cry for us, Argentina, most of these players have become unicorns or have successfully IPO'd.