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OpenSearch is the AWS fork of ElasticSearch prior to the license change aimed at preventing AWS from copying Elastic IP without compensation.

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> copying Elastic IP without compensation

is a bit of a strange way of saying "selling ElasticSearch as a service".

Is it? Maybe I've been talking to too many lawyers lately.

> Maybe I've been talking to too many lawyers lately.

Only to be expected, with that nick.

Whats the difference between Opensearch and the Open Distro for Elastic Search[1] provided by AWS?

https://opendistro.github.io/for-elasticsearch/

From the most recent news item on the link you posted: “In the coming weeks this website (https://opendistro.github.io/for-elasticsearch/) will be selectively decommissioned and/or forwarded to the corresponding OpenSearch.org content.”

Having used Open Distro for a little while, I really don't have high hopes for this project, although I would like to be proved wrong.

Open Distro was largely unloved - lots of Github issues remaining untriaged, and various small but poor technical decisions. I've seen FOSS projects that don't have massive corporate backing handle their projects better.

Perhaps the license change will force Amazon to put more resources into the project.

How is it copying IP when it was licensed that way?

Elastic considers ElasticSearch to be its IP and has changed its license from Apache 2.0 to a more restrictive version to prevent AWS from monetizing it. In response, AWS forked ElasticSearch into OpenSearch at the most recent commit that was still on the Apache 2.0 license.

Sorry, do not follow that area. Can someone explain to the uninvolved? Who changed from which license to which?

The owner of the code can of course change the license. But in typical open source projects there are 100s of contributors, so changing the license can be anything between a major job and impossible.

Elastic requires contributors to sign a CLA. Their CLA does not reassign copyright but gives Elastic a license to distribute contributed code without restrictions. [1]

Elastic changed the license for Elasticsearch >7.10.2 from Apache to a more restrictive one to prevent cloud providers like AWS from providing a hosted version.

[1] https://github.com/elastic/elasticsearch/blob/master/CONTRIB...

If there’s only one owner, either through limiting the contributions or through insisting on a CLA, then that owner can do what they like moving forwards. They can’t change things retrospectively, though.

There's been a lot of discussion on this already: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=pastYear&page=0&prefix=fal...

Elastic requires a CLA for contributions: https://www.elastic.co/contributor-agreement

AWS used ElasticSearch; but it was a big headache for Elastic the company to support because it had custom bits which integrated AWS and they used an old version; support issues came in for these versions and it was a pain to manage. (There was also a money issue here).

As a result Elastic the company licensed the new versions of the elastic code with a licence AWS wouldn’t be able to use.

So AWS forked the last Apache* version and continued its development in the Apache license. This is the result of that.

They forked the Apache version. Not GPL.

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