Is Elasticsearch GPLv3 compatible?

Elastic Stack Elasticsearch
1

Hello,

I'm new to licensing.. Please be gentle with me :slight_smile:

I'm working on an ebook reader software which is licensed under GPLv3.

I'm using ES with Apache Tika for full-text search on PDFs and EPUBs. I'm running ES in localhost:9200 and utilising the REST API to GET,PUT,DELETE the documents

I'm trying to move the repo from Github to https://savannah.gnu.org

I'm comunicating with one of the administrators from that website. Please check here https://savannah.gnu.org/task/?14536

The administrator is telling me that ES is not fully compatible with GPLv3. I don't understand, what he wrote is kinda confusing to me. Maybe because I'm not a native English speaker.

I need help regarding Elasticsearch compatibility with GPLv3 software.

Thanks!

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You might want to check out this page: Apache License v2.0 and GPL Compatibility. Here is a quote from this page:

Apache 2 software can therefore be included in GPLv3 projects, because the GPLv3 license accepts our software into GPLv3 works. However, GPLv3 software cannot be included in Apache projects. The licenses are incompatible in one direction only, and it is a result of ASF's licensing philosophy and the GPLv3 authors' interpretation of copyright law.

1 Like
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Thank you for the link, I posted a reply there.

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Sorry I had not read that savannah link that mentions that his concern is more about Elasticsearch's dependencies than Elasticsearch itself. You can ignore what I said above.

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Can you help with that? I think, you can directly post it in savannah thread.. if you are clear with my problem.

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Sorry, licensing is hard and I have no legal background. I felt ok sharing a link but taking side is a different problem.

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Where should I post this question?, so someone from your company could help me with this? Elasticsearch github repo says that I should ask here for general questions.

This is a problem regarding Elasticsearch and it's dependencies' licensing compatibility with the popular GPLv3 license. I hope someone from Elasticsearch's legal team could help me with this or put an information regarding this on NOTICE.txt

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