what is preventing AWS from dropping OpenSearch and going back to just selling Elastic ?
Edit: As long as OpenSearch doesn’t start breaking the self hosted use case, I don’t see any reason to consider Elasticsearch again. In fact, ES would have to offer up a significant advantage to overcome the bother.
What metric are you using to come to the conclusion that OpenSearch is the more valuable brand?
• Google search volume and quantity of search result pages (blogs, recipes, etc.)
• Mentions in LinkedIn profiles as a skill
• Number of job post listings as a requisite skill
• Social media mentions
It is a measure of "mindshare" or "share of voice." Not one of market share ($$$) or utilization (TBs under management, etc.).
With that said, in the August 2024 listing:
• Elasticsearch is ranked #8 (of 423 systems tracked), with an index score of 129.83
• OpenSearch is ranked #35, with an index score of 16.47
This would make OpenSearch about an eighth as prevalent.
A big question is New + Churning installs. I'd expect a scary portion of the New, and inherently slower rate of Churn are heading to OS instead ES. The curves support that: note that ES isn't substantively growing on that chart. Anecdotally, we see most new installs as leaning to OS in the security industry, which is one of the top money makers for ES/OS.
Opensearch is definitely coming on strong.
That's not true—we're talking about brand value, not financial value of the product. If AWS switched over to offering ElasticSearch again (not that they will) and ditched OpenSearch, I have no reason to believe that their financial numbers would go down a bit.
Brand value is nearly impossible to measure, but to the extent that you can it'd be by measuring perception among those outside the company, not through an accounting of the company's actual revenue.
Think of it this way: the brand LENRUE [0] is worth approximately zero. The company that makes these products could rebrand tomorrow and their revenue stream wouldn't take a hit in the slightest. But the company presumably actually makes some amount of money.
For Elastic vs OpenSearch, the brand value of the two products should be loosely comparable by looking at some measures of public perceptions, and I can't find any measurement that would suggest OpenSearch is in the lead.
[0] https://www.amazon.com/stores/LENRUE/page/24E9713E-AC7E-4269...
Anecdata, but very real.
I don't have those metrics or an opinion, im just saying that value is based on utilization by a product's target users, not support activities.
Stars and rate of star growth and stack overflow activity are all passable proxies. They're not great, and I'm open to better metrics, but they're what I can find.
Truly, if anyone can give me any metric that shows OpenSearch ahead I'll shut up. I can't find one, and I've looked.
If I'm right that OpenSearch has a weak brand, Amazon could switch and their internal stats and revenue wouldn't budge.
Contrary to what other people are saying in this thread, I would not say it has better branding than ElasticSearch and that ES has lost its battle. Outside AWS OpenSearch is still not a big contender
One of them is not the company talking about their license choice but a FUD article crying about AGPL which we've seen a million tired versions of.
The Rethink one says
> * Require users who choose to modify RethinkDB to fit their needs to release the patches to the software development community.
> * Require users who are unwilling to release the patches to the software development community to purchase a commercial license.
note:
> * who choose to modify RethinkDB
and
> * release the patches
none of these say anything about problems with putting control planes in front of it.
I have worked with cloud hosting a database where the only feature behind the enterprise license is a load balancer with some dead simple authz plugins.
You can write put any LB in front of it and host and sell it with the same capabilities without violating the OSS license. Adding a "control plane" that sits in front of the hosted database does not require you to publish any modifications unless you actually are running a modified version of the open source software. You would never have to publish your own LB.
it happens - why would you think commercial operators who’ve chosen a dual-license model wouldn’t protect their IP? That’s literally their breadwinner.
like, answer the question instead of evading, surely it cannot be that hard.
So they were originally Apache-2.0 which was permissive versus now they are AGPL which is copyleft.
The important distinction here is that if Amazon was to use Elastic directly, they'd have to make their contributions available to users and those users could then upstream those contributions back to Elastic. In the old situation with Apache-2.0, Amazon could take contributions from Elastic but then they kept them themself for the most part without up-streaming.
This forces a give-and-take relationship vs a one-way relationship.
Also importantly now that Elastic is AGPL they can integrate anything they want from OpenSearch's Apache-2.0 licensed projects but unless OpenSearch becomes AGPL as well, they can't pull any contributions from Elastic.
There going to be some hard irony here, of making such a fuss about it before, when it was someone else doing it, and then doing it themselves.
We’ll see. Maybe they’re principled enough not to rip off the open search contributions.
If not, you’ve really got to believe there’s no sincerity left at elastic.
I guess time will tell; I’d like to believe they’re better than that.
Now you have two open source projects and one has a copyleft license and the other has a permissive license.
Taking contributions from the permissive to the copyleft project isn't ripping off contributions. It's using open source software and collaborating in the FOSS ecosystem. And Amazon would be free to pull contributions back the other way just as well as long as they agree to the mutual terms of the AGPL (which is by all means a FOSS license).