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That’s an odd way to describe it. Elasticsearch was a wrapper around Lucene. Had they started with a restrictive license rather than wait until it got popular under the nonrestrictive license, Solr might have taken off more. OpenSearch is what the community needed. That Amazon did it is fine.

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Here's a good discussion from here in 2021 about the fork that colors my perception: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26780848

Yeah Amazon’s motivations aren’t great, but it’s occupying a space that opened up when Elastic changed the license on Elasticsearch. Nobody’s going to create another permissively licensed alternative to it just because they’re annoyed it’s an Amazon project.

Amazon, after making its pretty barebones fork, lobbed it off to the Linux Foundation. It ultimately feels lazy and self-serving in a way only a select few companies can pull off.

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