AWS hands OpenSearch to Linux Foundation – is this why Elasticsearch was made open source again? • DEVCLASS

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.

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