Updated with comment from Elastic:

Amazon Web Services Inc. is boosting its open-source credentials with today’s release of its new Open Distro for Elasticsearch.

Elasticsearch is a business-focused search engine for structured and unstructured data based on the open source Apache Lucene project. It’s most often used for log analytics, full-text search, security intelligence, business analytics and operational intelligence use cases. AWS offers its own version of the software with the AWS Elasticsearch Service, a managed offering that makes it easy to deploy, operate and scale up Elasticsearch clusters on its cloud infrastructure.

The company said the new release is “value-added distribution of Elasticsearch that is 100 percent open source,” available under an Apache 2.0 license and supported by Amazon. Open Distro for Elasticsearch is based on the open-source code for the regular Elasticsearch project, and also incorporates code from Kibana, which is a data visualization plugin for Elasticsearch.

In a blog post, Adrian Cockcroft, vice president of cloud architecture strategy at AWS, insisted that the Open Distro release was not a fork of Elasticsearch, but rather is intended as a separate and “feature-rich” version of the platform that’s fully open-source.

Cockcroft reckons the Open Distro is necessary because Elasticsearch Global BV, which is the lead developer of Elasticsearch and goes by the name “Elastic,” is “muddying the waters” by adding a significant amount of proprietary software into its code base.

Adding proprietary code to create new features isn’t a problem in itself. Most commercial backers of open-source software do the same, and then usually add on some support services as well in order to make money from the software. But in the case of Elasticsearch, there is now an “extreme lack of clarity” as to what open-source users are getting, according to Cockcroft.

“For example, neither release notes nor documentation make it clear what is open-source and what is proprietary,” Cockcroft said. “Enterprise developers may inadvertently apply a fix or enhancement to the proprietary source code. This is hard to track and govern and could lead to breach of license and immediate termination of rights.”

Another concern for AWS is that it believes innovation has shifted away from improving the open-source version of Elasticsearch to boosting the proprietary implementation.

“We have discussed our concerns with Elastic, the maintainers of Elasticsearch, including offering to dedicate significant resources to help support a community-driven, non-intermingled version of Elasticsearch,” Cockcroft said. “They have made it clear that they intend to continue on their current path.”

As a result, Amazon has decided to go it alone with its Open Distro, which comes with new open-source features not seen in the regular version, including encryption of data in transit, user authentication and granular roles-based access control.

Update: Not surprisingly, Elastic didn’t buy Amazon’s view of the situation. Shay Banon, the company’s chief executive, said in a blog post Tuesday that the company has been successful with Elasticsearch because of the trust of many users.

“Our products were forked, redistributed and rebundled so many times I lost count,” he wrote. “It is a sign of success and the reach our products have. From various vendors, to large Chinese entities, to now, Amazon. There was always a ‘reason,’ at times masked with fake altruism or benevolence. None of these have lasted. They were built to serve their own needs, drive confusion, and splinter the community.”

Moreover, he wrote, Elastic’s commercial code has been “bluntly copied by various companies, and even found its way back to certain distributions or forks, like the freshly minted Amazon one, sadly, painfully, with critical bugs.”

In particular, Banon appeared to dispute Amazon’s characterization of its attempts to work with Elastic, implying that it was asking for special consideration and influence.

“Companies have falsely claimed that they work in collaboration with our company, topically Amazon,” he wrote. “When companies came to us, seeing our success, and asked for special working relationship in order to collaborate on code, demanding preferential treatment that would place them above our users, we told them no. This happened numerous times over the years, and only recently again, this time with Amazon…. There is no preference, and we will reject any ask to have one. Our answer has always been a constant: send a pull request, like everybody else does.”

Cockcroft said the new features are designed to plug a number of gaps in the open source version of Elasticsearch, where functions such as security, event monitoring and SQL support is only available to those who adopt and pay for Elastic’s proprietary code.

“Many of these features are ones that we have been working on for inclusion in Amazon Elasticsearch Service,” Cockcroft said. “Open Distro for Elasticsearch enables users to run the same feature-rich distribution anywhere they wish, such as on-premises, on laptops, or in the cloud.”

Analyst Holger Mueller of Constellation Research Inc. told SiliconANGLE that it makes sense for Amazon to throw its weight behind Elasticsearch in this case, since the software is a key part of its cloud infrastructure offerings. “It shows AWS can be a good open-source citizen that contributes to the community,” he said.

Image: AWS