Somehow Amazon's Open Source Fork of Elasticsearch Has Succeeded
infoworld.com
infoworld.com
We will be contributing greatly because a lot of the libraries are significantly worse... I don't understand it honestly, but the specter of Elasticsearch potentially doing something horrible has made it so that I have to move off of it.
I've tried all I could to explain the fears are misplaced, and have no relevance, but I've lost this battle.
A year and a half ago, I could have probably had our company just pay for the license. But the winds blow and change, and now I can't even keep it.
Opensearch is a spiteful distraction and in a just world Amazon wouldn't have been allowed to call it "OpenSearch"
As TFA puts it, building a "bonafide open source" project.
How is it half dead? Just because it doesn't have the latest shiny features that Elastic has? Was Elastic useless before?
OpenSearch is Apache 2.0 licensed. Why shouldn't it be called "open"?
And calling it open is fine, Amazon got dinged for calling their ES service Elasticsearch because it was confusing. Calling it Opensearch while touting Elasticsearch support is just as confusing, people fail to realize it's not Open Source Elasticsearch, it's fallen so far behind it doesn't touch on half the functionality ES offwrs
But somehow users still manage to derive value from OpenSearch.
> Calling it Opensearch while touting Elasticsearch support is just as confusing
Right. Because it's not like Amazon explicitly state that they won't support Elastic Search versions beyond 7.10. Oh, wait: https://aws.amazon.com/what-is/opensearch/
Because OpenSearch is built on the X-Pack components before they got moved to X-Pack.
> Right. Because it's not like Amazon explicitly state that they won't support Elastic Search versions beyond 7.10. Oh, wait: https://aws.amazon.com/what-is/opensearch/
You missed that your own linked post was speaking about hosting ES, not ES compatibility.
https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/opensource/keeping-clients-of-o...
> OpenSearch aims to provide wire compatibility with open source distributions of Elasticsearch 7.10.2, the software from which it was derived.
You also missed that it's about the literal name OpenSearch vs Elasticsearch.
Amazon benefits from people believing that OpenSearch is equivalent to Elasticsearch but open source, when really its this trailing orphaned fork that represents a significantly worse product: It'd be like if MariaDB had been named OpenMySQL.
When I check their Github, I see recent commits, merged pull requests etc. Doesn't look half-dead at all.
I don't know if other open-source alternatives (like meilisearch perhaps) have more activity, but OpenSearch looks far from half-dead.
> in a just world Amazon wouldn't have been allowed to call it "OpenSearch"
Any reason an open-source project for search should not be called "OpenSearch", aside from "I don't like Amazon, so the project is bad"?
If you want to pretend that the thought process was "open source search" => OpenSearch you're free to do that.
The rest of us realize the project exists because they were unfairly benefiting from the Elasticsearch trademark and got push back...
So naming it "OpenSearch" then mentioning Elasticsearch 70 times in your FAQ https://opensearch.org/faq/ isn't a coincidence: they want to drive the same kind of confusion they got called out on in the first place.
Wasn't Elasticsearch initially 100% FOSS and you were allowed to sell it as a service? Where is the "unfairly benefiting" part coming from?
FOSS doesn't mean you can steal their name, even in the purest forms of open source.
And the irony is AWS has mountains of closed source components that would benefit others to actually productize "OpenSearch". Under SSPL Amazon would be able to serve Elasticsearch... if they were willing to walk the walk and open source the stuff that enables their orchestration.