The Linux Foundation will take over OpenSearch, the AWS-sponsored fork of Elasticsearch.
There is a newly-formed OpenSearch Foundation with premier members comprised of AWS, SAP, and Uber; and general members including Aiven, Aryn, Atlassian, Canonical, Digital Ocean, Eliatra, Graylog, NetApp Instaclustr, and Portal26.
Nandini Ramani, AWS VP of search and cloud operation, said the purpose of the transfer was to set up the “next stage of growth” for the project, and emphasized “vendor-neutral governance,” which includes a new technical steering committee.
The OpenSearch team said the project had received contributions from upwards of 1,000 contributors since its 2021 launch, and has been downloaded more than 700 million times.
The move comes a few weeks after Elastic CTO and co-founder Shay Banon declared that “Elasticsearch and Kibana can be called Open Source again,” and introduced a new license option using the AGPL (GNU Affero General Public License), which is approved as open source by the OSI (Open Source Initiative).
The origins of OpenSearch go back to 2019, when AWS introduced the Open Distro for Elasticsearch, with former AWS VP Adrian Cockcroft stating that although Elasticsearch had “played a key role in democratizing analytics of machine-generated data,” the Elastic company was now allowing “significant intermingling of proprietary code into the code base,” such that most new Elasticsearch users were actually running proprietary software. The innovation in the project, Cockcroft claimed, was going towards promoting the proprietary software rather than advancing the open source distribution.
More recently, Cockcroft said that when AWS tried to add features to the open source project, such as advanced security, Elastic opposed them in order to retain differentiation for its paid-for enterprise version.
Elastic’s perspective was that AWS was profiting from hosting open source Elasticsearch but not “collaborating with us.” It also objected to the use of the Elasticsearch trademarked name.
The end result of this public spat and litigation was that in 2021 AWS introduced OpenSearch as an open source fork of the Elasticsearch 7.10.2 database engine and the Kibana 7.10.2 dashboard. The code was hosted on GitHub with the main projects being OpenSearch and OpenSearch Dashboards.
Banon said in his recent post that “Amazon is fully invested in their fork,” meaning perhaps that AWS is unlikely to attempt hosting open source Elasticsearch without paying a fee to Elastic. Plenty of companies do use Elasticsearch on AWS, in the form of Elastic Cloud, which is a licensed service which brings revenue to Elastic, and which is also available on Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud.
According to Banon, Elastic knew when it put licensing barriers around Elasticsearch that “it would result in a fork of Elasticsearch with a different name;” yet it is hard to see how the existence of OpenSearch benefits the company, and the introduction of the new Foundation may draw more contributors to OpenSearch rather than Elasticsearch, as well as increasing adoption of the fork. Despite Banon’s move to introduce AGPL for the main parts of Elasticsearch and Kibana, a project maintained by an open source foundation provides more reassurance that contributions will not end up under a restrictive license.