The First Commit
Mihir Soni included inOn January 14th, 2021, Elastic announced they were changing the license on Elasticsearch and Kibana. No more Apache 2.0 — going forward it’d be the Elastic License or SSPL instead.
I remember hearing about it at work and thinking, okay, that’s a big deal, but I didn’t know yet that it was about to become my problem.
Sixteen days later, on January 30th, I merged PR #6 — “Remove x-pack directory” — into a brand new repo called opensearch-project/OpenSearch-Dashboards. The repo had been created less than five hours earlier. I checked the timestamps later: repo created 22:10 UTC, my PR merged 02:58 UTC. Under five hours from “this repo exists” to “here’s the first commit.”
There was no announcement yet. No blog post, no press release, nothing on Hacker News. As far as the outside world knew, nothing had happened. Internally, a small group of us had been told: we’re forking Elasticsearch and Kibana, keeping everything on Apache 2.0, and we’re starting now. Not “we’re starting a design doc.” Starting.
My job that first day was about as unglamorous as it gets — go into the Kibana codebase and rip out the x-pack directory, the commercial, non-Apache-2.0 part of the code. Not rewrite it, not replace it, just remove it and make sure the rest of the app still built. Delete a directory, see what breaks, fix it.
No whiteboard session, no kickoff meeting. Just a repo, a checkout, and a directory that needed to go. I merged that PR, went and looked for the next broken thing, and merged that too.
Not sure yet how long this takes, or what it’s called by the time anyone outside the team sees it. Right now it’s just a checkout of Kibana with a directory missing, and a list of things that still need to come out after it.