Tech
Elastic founder on returning to open source four years after going proprietary
Licensing kerfuffles have long been a defining facet of the commercial open source space. Some of the biggest vendors have switched to a more restrictive “copyleft” license, as Grafana and Element have done, or gone full proprietary, as HashiCorp did last year with Terraform.
But one $8 billion company has gone the other way.
Elastic, the creator of enterprise search and data retrieval engine Elasticsearch and the Kibana visualization dashboard, threw a surprise curveball last month when it revealed it was going open source once more — nearly four years after switching to a couple of proprietary “source available” licenses. The move goes against a grain that has seen countless companies ditch open source altogether. Some are even creating a whole new licensing paradigm, as we’re seeing with “fair source,” which has been adopted by several startups.
“It was just taking too long”
In 2021, Elastic moved to closed source licenses after several years of conflict with Amazon’s cloud subsidiary AWS, which was selling its own managed version of Elasticsearch. While AWS was perfectly within its rights to do so given the permissive nature of the Apache 2.0 license, Elastic took umbrage at the way that AWS was marketing its incarnation, using branding such as “Amazon Elasticsearch.” Elastic believed this was causing too much confusion, as customers and end users don’t always pay too much attention to the intricacies of open source projects and the associated commercial services.
“People sometimes think that we changed the license because we were upset with Amazon for taking our open source project and providing it ‘as a service,’” Elastic co-founder and CTO Shay Banon told TechCrunch in an interview this week. “To be honest, I was always okay with it, because it’s in the license that they’re allowed to do that. The thing we always struggled with was just the trademark violation.”
Elastic pursued legal avenues to get Amazon to retreat from the Elasticsearch brand, a scenario reminiscent of the ongoing WordPress brouhaha we’ve seen this past week. And while Elastic later settled its trademark spat with AWS, such legal wrangles consume a lot of resources, when all the company wanted to do was safeguard its brand.
“When we looked at the legal route, we felt like we had a really good case, and it was actually one that we ended up winning, but that wasn’t really relevant anymore because of the change we’d made [to the Elasticsearch license],” Banon said. “But it was just taking too long — you can spend four years winning a legal case, and by then you’ve lost the market due to confusion.”
Back to the future
The change was always something of a sore point internally, as the company was forced to use language such as “free and open” rather than “open source.” But the change worked as Elastic had hoped, forcing AWS to fork Elasticsearch and create a variant dubbed OpenSearch, which the cloud giant transitioned over to the Linux Foundation just this month.
With enough time having passed, and OpenSearch now firmly established, Banon and company decided to reverse course and make Elasticsearch open source once more.
“We knew that Amazon would fork Elasticsearch, but it’s not like there was a huge masterplan here — I did hope, though, that if enough time passed with the fork, we could maybe return to open source,” Banon said. “And to be honest, it’s for a very selfish reason — I love open source.”
Elastic hasn’t quite gone “full” circle, though. Rather than re-adopting its permissive Apache 2.0 license of yore, the company has gone with AGPL, which has greater restrictions — it requires that any derivative software be released under the same AGPL license.
For the past four years, Elastic has given customers a choice between its proprietary Elastic license or the SSPL (server side public license), which was created by MongoDB and subsequently failed to get approved as “open source” by the Open Source Initiative (OSI), the stewards of the official open source definition. While SSPL already offers some of the benefits of an open source license, such as the ability to view and modify code, with the addition of AGPL, Elastic gets to call itself open source once again — the license is recognized as such by the OSI.
“The Elastic [and SSPL] licenses were already very permissive and allowed you to use Elasticsearch for free; they just didn’t have the stamp of ‘open source,’” Banon said. “We know about this space so much, but most users don’t — they just Google ‘open source vector database,’ they see a list, and they choose between them because they care about open source. And that’s why I care about being on that list.”
Moving forward, Elastic says that it’s hoping to work with the OSI toward creating a new license, or at least having a discussion about which licenses do and don’t get to be classed as open source. The perfect license, according to Banon, is one that sits “somewhere between AGPL and SSPL,” though he concedes that AGPL in itself may actually be sufficient for the most part.
But for now, Banon says that simply being able to call itself “open source” again is good enough.
“It’s still magical to say ‘open source’ — ‘open source search,’ ‘open source infrastructure monitoring,’ ‘open source security,’” Banon said. “It encapsulates a lot in two words — it encapsulates the code being open, and all the community aspects. It encapsulates a set of freedoms that we developers love having.”
Tech
Tesla brings its robotaxi service to Dallas and Houston
Tesla is expanding its robotaxi service to Dallas and Houston, according to a social media post from the company.
The post says simply that “Robotaxi is now rolling out in Dallas & Houston 🤠” and includes a 14-second video showing Tesla vehicles driving without human monitors or drivers in the front seat.
The company now offers robotaxi service in three cities, all of them in Texas, after launching in Austin last year and starting to offer rides without safety drivers in January 2026. In a February filing, Tesla said that its Austin robotaxis have been involved in 14 crashes since launch.
It also offers a more limited ride service with human drivers in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Tesla may not be running many vehicles in either of these new markets yet, with crowdsourced data on the Robotaxi Tracker website only registering a single vehicle in each city (compared to 46 active vehicles logged in Austin).
Tech
Netflix plans to add a vertical video feed, use AI for recommendations
Netflix is going to launch a TikTok-like vertical video feed within its apps this month, and plans to use AI broadly for content creation and recommendations, the company said on Thursday.
Netflix has been testing a vertical video feed since last year. The short video feature could aid users with discovering video podcasts, along with the current slate of shows and movies. The company is also leaning more into using AI for recommendations after launching a ChatGPT-powered search feature last year.
“We have been in personalization and recommendation for two decades, but we still see tremendous room to make it better by leveraging newer technologies,” Netflix co-CEO Gregory Peters said during the company’s first-quarter conference call. “Recommendation systems based on new model architectures not only improve current personalization but also let us iterate and improve more quickly — adding support for different content types much more efficiently.”
Co-CEO Ted Sarandos said he sees AI tools improving the entire content creation process. “In general, we expect GenAI to make content better; better tools, better processes […] It takes a great artist to make great art, and AI won’t change that. But AI will give those artists better tools to bring those visions to life,” he said.
Last month, Netflix bought Ben Affleck’s AI creation company InterPositive, which, Sarandos said, has garnered interest from creators.
“With our acquisition of InterPositive, we think it accelerates our GenAI capability because it is proprietary technology created specifically for filmmakers and filmmaking, different from other GenAI video applications. While our ownership of InterPositive is very new, we have generated interest with creators who have spent time with the tools, and we are seeing momentum build around adoption,” he noted.
Netflix also mentioned that it wants to use AI to improve its ad suite, and allow for new formats and customization to get better returns. The company expects to generate ad revenue of $3 billion this year.
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Netflix reported revenue of $12.25 billion in Q1 2026, up 16.2% year-year-year, and said profit jumped 83% to $5.28 billion. Alongside the first-quarter results, Netflix said its co-founder and chair, Reed Hastings, is leaving the company’s board this summer.
Notably, the company hiked subscription prices in the U.S. late last month, which could have a positive impact next quarter. The company said it ended 2025 with 325 million paying subscribers.
Tech
Bluesky confirms DDoS attack is cause of continued app outages
Bluesky’s website and app are still struggling on Friday after experiencing service interruptions that chief operating officer Rose Wang attributed to an ongoing cyberattack.
On Thursday evening, the social media company confirmed that a “sophisticated Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attack” was to blame for the issues, which had originally started on April 15 at around 8:40 p.m. ET.
Distributed denial-of-service attacks often involve pummeling apps or websites with large amounts of junk web traffic aimed at overloading and knocking its servers offline. While these kinds of cyberattacks do not involve intrusions into a company’s systems, these incidents can still be disruptive to both the company and its users.
In a post on the Bluesky account, the company shared the cause of the problem and noted that the attack was “impacting our operations, with users experiencing intermittent interruptions in service for their feeds, notifications, threads, and search.”
Bluesky said that it has not seen any evidence of unauthorized access to private data, however.
When originally reached for comment on Thursday, Bluesky only pointed us to the status.bsky.app page and account (@status.bsky.app) for updates. The company did not provide an estimated time for a fix.
The network’s status page is currently not working, however.
Bluesky said it will provide another update on the status of the attack and its mitigation by 1 p.m. ET on Friday.
Because the outages are intermittent, the Bluesky site and app will load at times, slowly, and other times will display error messages.
For instance, switching to a particular feed within the app could display a message that says, “This feed is currently receiving high traffic and is temporarily unavailable. Please try again later. Message from server: Rate Limit Exceeded.”
Popular feeds like Discover or the official Bluesky Team’s feed often see this problem, even as users’ own personal feeds are functional.
Other times, like when trying to visit a user’s profile, the site will display an error message, forcing you to refresh and try again.
Bluesky protocol engineer Bryan Newbold remarked around 3:46 a.m. ET on Wednesday, “oof, our services are getting hit pretty hard tonight.”
Notably, the service disruptions are impacting Bluesky, but other communities, like Blacksky, that run their own infrastructure on the underlying protocol that powers the decentralized social network, are still functioning.
Blacksky’s team told TechCrunch that the Bluesky outage has led to a “significant spike” in migration requests from Bluesky users over the past 12 hours, as users, devs, and other ATmosphere founders like Sebastian at Eurosky have been promoting its services.
It was clear that Bluesky’s team was in a hectic state this week while facing these issues, as one message on its status page had a typo: ” investigating an incident with service in one of our reginos [sic].”
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