Source code for X-Pack released

The source code for commercial software that Elastic developed to extend the stack, will soon be opened. CEO Shay Banon announced that Elastic customers who had been paying for high-end enterprise features like machine learning (ML) in the X-Pack extension will no longer be relegated to a ‘second-class citizen’ experience.

Banon shared some interesting facts related to the release during his keynote address at the company’s ElasticON conference in San Francisco. “This is a big chance for us. I’m super excited about it. I can’t begin to explain how simple this will make things for us,” he shared.

Elastic customers were upset about the quality of customer support they had been receiving. The complaints were the result of the different processes Elastic’s customer support organisation used to help X-pack users resolve issues, versus how it interacted with customers who use its core open source Elastic stack, which includes Elasticsearch, Logstash, Kibana, and other tools.

“We’re taking all of our commercial IP … and we’re clicking ‘make public’ on GitHub,” Banon said. “We’re going to take that and hopefully get to a level where we collaborate with you regardless of whether you end up being an open source user or a customer, across all of our products, across the whole of the stack,” he added.

Elastic offers two X-Pack packages. The basic version was made free two years ago and includes monitoring, while the other, which included advanced features like machine learning and graph analytics capabilities, required payment. “The problem was that even customers who used the free basic version of X-Pack were getting an inferior customer support experience compared to those who downloaded and used the open source products,” Banon shared.

“If the code is closed, you can’t open an issue; there’s a different issue-tracking system,” Banon explained. “The free features that we give you, which we truly believe every user of our stack should use, are not being used at the level we would like them to be, and in my mind this happens because of a lack of collaboration. We don’t have the level of collaboration that we believe we should have with you, even on code that’s not open source,” he said.