Elastic license changes do not affect Search Guard

By Jochen Kressin

In January 2021, Elastic decided to break with its tradition of providing Elasticsearch and Kibana versions under the Apache2 license. From version 7.11 onwards, the code is dual-licensed under the Server Side Public License (SSPL) and the Elastic License. Users could choose which license to use.

In February 2021, Elastic announced the introduction of the Elastic License v2 (ELv2), which replaces the older Elastic license. At the time of writing, the most recent versions of Elasticsearch and Kibana are dual-licensed under SSPL and ELv2.

No changes for Search Guard users

These changes do not impact the licensing and usage of Search Guard in any way. The license changes only apply to Elasticsearch and Kibana and have zero impact on plugins like Search Guard.

Elastic publicly states:

"This change does not affect how you build or license plugins to Elasticsearch or Kibana."

You can continue to download, install and run Search Guard just as before, and enjoy all the features of the free Community Edition or the commercial Enterprise and Compliance Edition.

We continue to publish Search Guard releases for any new Elasticsearch and Kibana versions and have already made available Search Guard for Elasticsearch 7.11, 7.12 and 7.13.

LTS support for Elasticsearch 7.10.2

Users who either do not want to or cannot enter into the new license conditions are also covered. We decided to provide long-term support for the last Apache2-licensed version of Elasticsearch, v7.10.2.

If you want to or have to stay on this last OSS version of Elasticsearch and Kibana, we got you covered: We will backport all critical fixes to Search Guard for Elasticsearch 7.10.2 under our long term support for this version. This means you can still run a true OSS installation of Elasticsearch safely and securely.

Questions? Please drop us a note!

Thank you very much for using and trusting Search Guard. In case you have any questions about the Elastic license changes, please drop us a note via email (search-guard@floragunn.com) or by filling out the form below.

Published: 2021-08-04

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Search Guard is a trademark of floragunn GmbH, registered in the U.S. and in other countries. Elasticsearch, Kibana, Logstash, and Beats are trademarks of Elasticsearch BV, registered in the U.S. and in other countries. Apache and Apache Lucene are trademarks of the Apache Software Foundation in the United States and/or other countries.