Dear Search Guard Community

It has come to our attention that Elastic has filed a lawsuit against floragunn in the Northern District of California. Elastic claims in its public announcement that floragunn GmbH has copied "multiple and critical portions of Elastic’s X-Pack proprietary security source code into its Search Guard product". Furthermore, Elastic claims that "it was necessary for floragunn to intentionally decompile that code to enable the copying and creation of derivative works".

Floragunn sees no basis for any copyright infringement, vigorously rejects any and all of Elastic’s accusations and has consistently denied such accusations from Elastic in the past. The work related to Search Guard dates back to a point of time when a security solution from Elastic was unavailable. Floragunn has put a lot of hard work and effort into Search Guard over the years.

Floragunn will vigorously defend itself and its reputation and will take all necessary legal and other actions available to counter Elastic’s accusations.

We have inspected the claims from Elastic very thoroughly, and independent experts have examined the source code as well. This case is obviously the attempt of a big public company to destroy a small and innovative competitor by making false accusations of copyright infringement.

The lawsuit itself plus the accompanying public relations work is supposed to cause fear, doubt and uncertainty among our users and customers. Instead of competing fairly with Search Guard, Elastic unfortunately tries to harm floragunn with a lawsuit that has no basis.

Just recently AWS has announced the availability of advanced security features for its popular Amazon Elasticsearch Service and published the following statement about Search Guard:

"The security features included in Open Distro for Elasticsearch have been extremely popular, as open source Elasticsearch lacks even basic security features. To provide security for Open Distro for Elasticsearch, we worked with floragunn GmbH, a security specialist software company that develops Search Guard, a popular alternative to Elastic’s own commercial security features. We want to make the community aware that AWS performed our own due diligence prior to partnering with floragunn and found no evidence that Search Guard misappropriated any copyrighted material. Additionally, we evaluated all of the code specified by Elastic in their litigation, as well as engaged third party experts, and we are confident that there is no basis to Elastic’s claims.

We find it unfortunate that Elastic has resorted to litigation against floragunn, a valuable member of the Elasticsearch community. This kind of behavior is misaligned with the spirit of open source and is detrimental to the vibrancy of the community."

If you have any questions, please drop us an email: [email protected]