From Flashpoint to Foundation: OpenSearch’s Path Clears
The recent move by AWS to entrust the OpenSearch open source search and observability suite to the Linux Foundation, under the newly formed OpenSearch Software Foundation, is an overwhelmingly positive and exciting development for both OpenSearch users and the open source community at large.
Given OpenSearch’s history as a flashpoint and microcosm of industry shifts between true open source and open core software licensing, putting OpenSearch unquestioningly into the column of projects that will remain 100% open source for the long term offers welcome peace of mind. OpenSearch’s stability as a Linux Foundation project will undoubtedly drive a significant and lasting uptick in community participation and enterprise adoption and provide users with a more feature-rich, secure and scalable technology.
What Is OpenSearch?
A quick primer: OpenSearch is a powerful, scalable search and analytics engine that enables users to ingest, search and visualize different types of data. It’s a popular solution for log analytics, full-text search and application monitoring.
How It Started/How It’s Going
In January 2021, Elastic, the company behind the popular Elasticsearch tool, shifted its Elasticsearch code from the Open Source Initiative (OSI)-approved open source Apache 2.0 license to a more proprietary license. This move toward open core practices caused a swift uproar in the community, resulting in AWS creating OpenSearch as an open source fork of Elasticsearch. In the years since, much of the community and many businesses and users have selected OpenSearch for its fully open source advantages. In August 2024, Elastic claimed over 20,000 subscribers, while AWS reported “tens of thousands” of OpenSearch customers.
Elastic’s embrace of an open core strategy represents just one recent example of vendors turning away from open source principles in search of a business advantage. Just this March, Redis Labs made a similar change by switching Redis, one of the world’s most popular NoSQL databases, to a non-open source license. Almost needless to say, the community immediately went to work on open source forks, quickly producing alternatives such as Valkey, which is backed by AWS, Google and Oracle.
In the tug-of-war between vendors and communities pulling their software toward the open core or open source ends of the software-freedom spectrum, communities have time and again demonstrated their muscle.
Relevant to OpenSearch, the clearest consequence of the industry’s powerful intrinsic demand for open source options is that Elastic is now doubling back on its shift to a more proprietary model. The company announced at the end of September that Elasticsearch is going back to an open source distribution license.
To be clear, Elastic is a great company, and Elasticsearch is great software. But that decision shows that the open core strategy did not work out the way the company expected, as far as maintaining the community engagement, contributions and other tremendous benefits that are part and parcel with genuine open source projects.
What Does This Mean for the Future?
Call us biased at NetApp Instaclustr, but we’re big believers in 100% open source software and the communities that support them. Our platform provides the infrastructure and support required to operate OpenSearch, the open source alternative to Elasticsearch, and several other highly capable open source data layer technologies.
I think it’s important to state that our commitment to open source has never been a high-minded philosophical stance, but instead one grounded in the practical advantages that open source holds in bringing a community’s full strength to bear in addressing issues and realizing improvements.
Whereas open core solutions can leave enterprises in a quagmire of vendor or technical lock-in — unable to own and control their own code or port that code as they see fit — true open source options mean never encountering those obstacles.
Looking forward, I believe the recent developments with OpenSearch, Elastic, Redis and others point to a future where proprietary and open source options will probably continue to exist in tension with each other.
Given our position, you might expect me to predict a momentous pendulum swing back toward vendors offering pure open source options. And that could happen. But in reality, I think we’ll see a balance of both playing out on a continually larger scale.
Proprietary options will continue to offer extra features for additional licensing fees, while open source alternatives will compete with their own unique community-driven benefits.
Building From a Strong Foundation
At the end of the day, open source software thrives in an atmosphere of mutual trust. AWS deserves praise for standing up for the OpenSearch community and building a practice around it over the last few years.
While neither I nor my colleagues at NetApp Instaclustr held this concern, there was some underlying worry in the community that AWS might one day pivot and commercialize the software, along with the community’s many contributions. (After all, it was a shock when Elasticsearch first changed its licensing, and what happened once could happen again.)
With AWS now transferring ownership of OpenSearch to the OpenSearch Software Foundation, any such fears are laid to rest.
I expect that trust to result in more community participation, more growth and an acceleration in features getting built. We’ve been all-in on OpenSearch since day one as a partner and contributor to the OpenSearch project, working with AWS over the years. Through videos, webinars, and other avenues, we’ve engaged with the community as much as possible and plan to continue that involvement as general members of the new OpenSearch Software Foundation.
From AI/ML tools, to features supporting larger enterprise workloads, to more detailed documentation, I anticipate that OpenSearch will now become an even more appealing option for larger organizations that want to adopt an open source search engine supported by a strong community. This recent change to OpenSearch benefits everyone, and it’s a great time for developers and enterprises to get involved.
