AWS said today that it is moving OpenSearch, its open source version of the popular Elasticsearch search and analytics engine, to the Linux Foundation. The OpenSearch Foundation is the perfect name for this move.
Elastic changed the license for its Elasticsearch and Kibana projects to its own license, called the Elastic License, in 2021. That’s when AWS started the OpenSearch project for the first time. A lot of open source vendors made similar changes at the time, mostly to stop the big cloud providers, especially AWS, from giving hosted services based on their software.
It’s kind of funny that this move comes just a few weeks after Elastic said it would offer Elasticsearch and Kibana again under the AGPL, an open source license that requires users to share all of their source code if they make any changes. One interesting thing is that Elastic chose to offer this choice along with its own more limited license because, as the company put it, “we have people that really like ELv2.”
A lot of people didn’t trust AWS’s OpenSearch project when it was first made. AWS had never really been in charge of such a big project before. That was agreed upon by Mukul Karnik, who is in charge of AWS’s search services.
“When we made OpenSearch back then, it was cool for Amazon and AWS to take over an open source project and make it bigger,” he told me in a conversation before the news came out today. “Our goal from the start was to be community-driven and find ways to get more people in the community to join the project and help.”
Karnik said that AWS has slowly made the project more open, which encourages both input and more participation in running the project. It kind of became more natural, like how we’re taking natural steps to figure out how to get more people to join the project.
Along with SAP and Uber, other big companies are joining the Foundation as premier members as of today’s start. Aiven, Aryn, Atlassian, Canonical, Digital Ocean, Eliatra, Graylog, NetApp Instaclustr, and Portal26 are joining as general members.
Karnik said that AWS plans to make more donations to OpenSearch.
In 2021, there wasn’t a plan for a foundation yet, but Karnik said that giving the project its own base now seems like the next logical step. He also said that the OpenSearch environment has brought a lot of new ideas to the project, such as changing it from a system based on clusters to one that works better in the cloud. He also said that the project had recently added new features, such as section replication and separating compute and storage. Karnik said that as AI has become more popular, so has interest in OpenSearch as a vector library.
The new Foundation will have a governing board and a technical steering group, just like the Linux Foundation.
The head of the Linux Foundation, Jim Zemlin, said, “The Linux Foundation is excited to provide a neutral home for open and collaborative development around open source search and analytics.” “Search is something we all use every day, for both personal and business reasons. We’re excited to support the OpenSearch community and help them give people and businesses around the world powerful search and analytics tools.”
Like many other similar foundations, one of the main reasons AWS chose to join the project now is to use the Linux Foundation’s services and learn how to manage and grow open-source projects. This change also helps OpenSearch stop being seen as mainly an AWS-driven project, which is an important step for continued growth and wider acceptance.
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