Amazon Renames Its Open Source Fork of ElasticSearch 'Amazon OpenSearch Service'

"Amazon Web Services on Thursday fulfilled its commitment to rename Amazon Elasticsearch Service with its expected new identity, Amazon OpenSearch Service," reports the Register in a new update on Amazon's ongoing battle over open source licensing: The name change was necessary because AWS and Elasticsearch BV fell out over the licensing of the Elasticsearch open source software and the eating of one another's lunch.... While AWS promises that OpenSearch Service APIs will be backward-compatible with the existing service APIs (open source Elasticsearch 7.10), meaning no backend or client app changes should be necessary, building against new OpenSearch Service features means there's no going back. AWS says that upgrading from existing Elasticsearch 6.x and 7.x managed clusters to OpenSearch is irreversible.

[According to a blog post by Channy Yun, principal developer advocate for AWS], OpenSearch 1.0 (the AWS fork) supports three features unavailable in the legacy Elasticsearch versions still supported in Amazon OpenSearch Service: Transforms, Data Streams, and Notebooks in OpenSearch Dashboards... Amazon OpenSearch Service incorporates various other capabilities not present in the open-source Elasticsearch code, like security integrations (Active Directory, etc), reporting, alerting, and other such things. Cloud provider lock-in can become an issue even when there's compatibility between hosted open source services and the projects they're based upon.

What started out as an exercise in copying, the most lucrative form of flattery, has become a race to differentiate, or — to use the words of former Microsoft VP Paul Martiz when telling Intel representatives in 1995 about how Microsoft would deal with Netscape — "Embrace, extend, extinguish."

Secret in the sauce.

[Ostracus]

What started out as an exercise in copying, the most lucrative form of flattery, has become a race to differentiate, or — to use the words of former Microsoft VP Paul Martiz when telling Intel representatives in 1995 about how Microsoft would deal with Netscape — "Embrace, extend, extinguish."

How does one "extinguish" open-source? Does it involve being run over by a bus?

Simple: destroy the core development team

[DeplorableCodeMonkey]

How does one "extinguish" open-source? Does it involve being run over by a bus?

In every open source community, you have a core development team that does the heavy lift and is not easily replaced. Find a way to disrupt that, you disrupt the whole project.

For the ELK stack, that core is the group of developers employed by Elastic. There has probably never been a period in Elastic's history where the community could just pick up the pieces and move on without them.

A decade ago, I joined a small team that tried to pick up an open sourced app when its vendor ended its open sourcing plan. We failed to keep things going because it was too much work for half a dozen part time people to build a viable replacement. So it could easily happen with Elastic unless there is a real community building up around an open source fork.

Re:

[Anonymous Coward]

How does one "extinguish" open-source?

By letting it happen through inaction.

Here, ElasticSearch started out as open source, and was the defacto standard.
Then they choose to go closed-source, heavily restrict their license, and make both their API and storage formats proprietary, using the force of law to stop anyone from using "their" intellectual property that was created by other people.

If this was simply allowed to happen, this open source project would have become extinguished.

Thankfully Amazon stepped up to the plate and forked the last op

More open than where it forked from

[fingon]

Elasticsearch itself is becoming less and less open. Lots of features in xpack and most recently also not available if you want to offer it as a service. Due to that I would say opensearch is less about embrace etc than actually being open.

Repeat

[AlanObject]

Wasn't this reported about a month or two back already? Nothing new here.

Re:

[MoHaG]

This is the AWS hosted service (formerly "AWS ElasticSearch Service") based on OpenDistro for ElasticSearch adding OpenSearch and being renamed.

Slightly new, but certainly not unexpected after OpenDistro was renamed to OpenSearch (They basically changed the name and added OpenSearch 1.0 as an option)

Not eating each others' lunch...

[jddj]

Bezos. drinks. your...milkshake.

Don't make me laugh

[nospam007]

I have to use Google to find things on Amazon that their own search is unable to find for some reason.

Ignorant drivel

[thegarbz]

Did TFA really just compare this case here to MS's EEE? If like to remind the moron who wrote it that we're only in this situation because a crybaby developer got upset that a company followed the rules the developer chose, took their bat and ball and went home.

This isn't EEE, this is open source at is finest, forking away from bad practices and getting on with your life.

Amazon's changes are published. The Elasticsearch idiots are more than welcome to catch up now if they want their product to remain relevant.

Re:

[dfghjk]

This is an important point, and don't forget that this very same issue led to the creation of GPLv3, only then most everyone took the side of the crybaby.

Funny how often it is absolutely terrible that a company fully complies with a license.

RWIR

[DuroSoft]

Wish that instead of forking they rewrote it in something not so bloaty as Java. ES installations are notorious memory hogs. Would love to see this tech rewritten in Rust or Go.