[LEGAL-579] Possible License violation in Elasticsearch

• Type: Question
• Status: Resolved
• Priority: Major
• Resolution: Fixed
• Assignee: Unassigned
• Reporter: Uwe Schindler
• Created: 01/Jul/21 11:32
• Updated: 01/Jul/21 20:46
• Resolved: 01/Jul/21 20:46

Description

There is a license violation in Elasticsearch release 7.13, which contains an early copy of the ASFv2 licensed code of the Apache Commons Code Nysiis.java implementation.

At the beginning of this year, Elastic changed the license of their product to the Elastic License, replacing the license header of the file containing ASFv2 licensed code.

Code in Elasticsearch:

• 7.11: https://github.com/elastic/elasticsearch/blob/7.11/plugins/analysis-phonetic/src/main/java/org/elasticsearch/index/analysis/phonetic/Nysiis.java
• 7.12: https://github.com/elastic/elasticsearch/blob/7.12/plugins/analysis-phonetic/src/main/java/org/elasticsearch/index/analysis/phonetic/Nysiis.java
• 7.13: https://github.com/elastic/elasticsearch/blob/7.13/plugins/analysis-phonetic/src/main/java/org/elasticsearch/index/analysis/phonetic/Nysiis.java

This was the code before they relicensed (correct license): https://github.com/elastic/elasticsearch/blob/7.10/plugins/analysis-phonetic/src/main/java/org/elasticsearch/index/analysis/phonetic/Nysiis.java

I opened an issue on their issue tracker: https://github.com/elastic/elasticsearch/issues/74821

They fixed the problem in their master/main branch before the relicensing, but still all releases of Elasticsearch since 7.11 contain this file with wrong license header.

The code is a copy of an earlier version of https://github.com/apache/commons-codec/blob/b70e177f8733e9dd4e5f503620ed0b136b74785b/src/main/java/org/apache/commons/codec/language/Nysiis.java