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Comment by crewdragon | Hacker News Reader

It feels like Elastic got burnt with the license change, their stock is down 40% since they announced the fork, and they are starting to realize that being open source is important. I don't think AWS would abandon the fork given the amount of efforts they put in, they cannot walk back and re-brand their products.

It's sad to see elastic turning sides for their benefit, and as a contributor I feel betrayed. While OpenSearch on the flip side is more contributor friendly. I honestly feel all energies should be focused on one product to make it better instead of walking in different paths. Amazon has already taken that path and I don't think they will ever walk back, unlike Elastic.

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My understanding (after talking to several market analysts) is that OpenSearch is focused on APM/monitoring/log-aggregation, while Elasticsearch has an edge on pure search engine functionality and now AI.

That's because the license change by Elastic impacted not only Amazon, who could not provide Elasticsearch as a service anymore through its administrative consoles, but also all those vendors who were building APM/monitoring/log-aggregation solutions as-a-service on top of Elasticsearch. In fact, such vendors would typically use Elasticsearch as a back-end behind some custom UI.

So those vendors teamed up with AWS to develop OpenSearch.

Now last time I checked the commit history of the two projects, Elasticsearch had 3x more commits and many of them on cool new stuff, while OpenSearch focus seems to have remained on APM/log aggregation.

As someone who needs an actual "search engine", I am glad of the change, as I was worried OpenSearch may not be a viable open source alternative as it could be lagging behind in this domain.

Now I need to check what happens with the clients: will the client remain Apache License or will they change to AGPL? The latter would be a problem for closed source software.

Not in my experience. AWS is fully behind using opensearch as a search engine. For AI, hard to see how Elastic can compete with AWS...given it's vast resources and deployed products.

I have been using OpenSearch as a core component of the data plane for my customers specifically and exclusively for its:

  Search functions; and
  Data ingestion and transformation pipelines,

as well as a vector database for its k-NN approximate and radial similarity search functionality (with text embeddings for vector indices provided by another managed service). The current trench of work is focusing on moving all of the above into OpenSearch serverless collections.

I do not have the APM/monitoring use case anywhere near in my vicinity, and alarms and monitoring get griggered by / send metrics into CloudWatch.

I think your comment around the dip in their stock price is fairly misleading because it lacks context of the market sector overall. When ETSC announced in January 2021 their stock was around 150 and by November 2021 it was in the 180s, so the change very much was not responsible for crashing their stock - the market was. Their entire industry sector was pounded heading into 2022 and has never recovered. For example Datadog crashed from ~$190 to $80 over the course of 2022.

It’s impossible to know what would have happened if they had continued on their existing path. My guess is Amazon would have eaten their lunch and they’d be in a similar situation.

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