OpenSearch (software)
| Company type | Open source software project |
|---|---|
| Industry | Search engine software |
| Founded | 2021 |
| Founder | Amazon Web Services |
| Headquarters | Global (community-driven) |
Key people | AWS (initial control), OpenSearch Software Foundation (current steward) |
| Products | OpenSearch, OpenSearch Dashboards |
| Owner | OpenSearch Software Foundation |
| Parent | Linux Foundation (affiliated) |
OpenSearch represents a collection of software tools that includes a search engine—also called OpenSearch—and OpenSearch Dashboards, a visualization application designed for the search engine. This suite is developed under the OpenSearch Software Foundation, a project affiliated with the Linux Foundation, and is mainly implemented using Java.
By August 2024, AWS stated that OpenSearch supports "tens of thousands" of clients, whereas its competitor Elastic counts over 20,000 users. Over the previous year, OpenSearch attracted approximately 50 contributors each month, in contrast to ElasticSearch’s range of 70 to 90 monthly contributors.
History
The initiative began in 2021 when Amazon Web Services launched it as a fork of Elasticsearch and Kibana. This occurred after Elastic NV altered the licensing of newer releases from the open-source Apache License to the Server Side Public License (SSPL). Amazon maintained exclusive control and write privileges over the code repositories but welcomed community pull requests. Organizations including Logz.io, CrateDB, and Red Hat showed interest in either developing or participating in a community to sustain this open-source project.
On September 16, 2024, AWS and the Linux Foundation announced the establishment of the OpenSearch Software Foundation, transferring stewardship of OpenSearch from Amazon to this new entity housed within the Linux Foundation. At that time, OpenSearch had surpassed 700 million downloads, involved thousands of contributors, and was supported by over 200 maintainers. Founding premier members backing the foundation included Amazon Web Services, SAP, and Uber.
OpenSearch
OpenSearch is a search engine based on Lucene, forked from version 7.10.2 of the Elasticsearch platform. It eliminates Elastic NV’s trademarks and telemetry features and is distributed under the Apache License, version 2. Notably, it does not require a Contributor License Agreement. The project maintainers aim to ensure full compatibility with Elasticsearch during its initial releases.
OpenSearch Dashboards
OpenSearch Dashboards is derived from version 7.10.2 of Elastic’s Kibana software and is also licensed under the Apache License, version 2.