AWS hands over OpenSearch project to the Linux Foundation

Amazon Web Services is handing over the OpenSearch project to the newly founded OpenSearch Software Foundation under the umbrella of the Linux Foundation. This was announced by Nanini Ramani, Vice President of Search and Cloud Operations at AWS, at the Open Source Summit Europe in Vienna. The OpenSearch Software Foundation's mission is to further develop OpenSearch together with the community, maintainers and the Foundation's member organizations.

In the long term, OpenSearch will benefit from the Linux Foundation's experience and expertise in development, governance, project management, infrastructure and certification. Member organizations of the newly formed OpenSearch Software Foundation include Amazon Web Services, SAP and Uber as well as Aiven, Aryn, Atlassian, Canonical, DigitalOcean and Graylog.

OpenSearch is a fork of ElasticSearch and Kibana, which AWS launched in 2021 with SAP and Red Hat among others, after Elastic placed the software under the EL and SSPL licenses. These had prohibited the cloud provider from offering its distribution of the ELK stack.

When asked whether now was a good time to hand over the project to the Linux Foundation, Carl Meadows, Senior Product Manager for OpenSearch at AWS, told c't that contributions to the project from outside AWS had increased significantly over the years. The project has been well received by the community, also because many points of contact such as a Slack channel or public GitHub repositories for external developers have been created.

Around 1000 developers have now contributed to OpenSearch and the user forum has 6400 members. According to Randini, OpenSearch has now been downloaded 700 million times. The platform comprises OpenSearch Core, the search and analytics engine, OpenSearch Dashboards for visualization and the Data Prepper, which prepares data for further processing.

The transfer of the project to the Linux Foundation should now further increase confidence in the project and encourage developers and organizations that are reluctant to work on projects that are primarily based at a company. Jim Zemlin, Executive Director of the Linux Foundation, is pleased to be able to provide "a neutral home for the collaborative development of open source search and analytics".

OpenSearch is not the first fork that the Linux Foundation has taken under its wing. Most recently, the organization had already taken on OpenTofu, a fork of the infrastructure-as-code tool Terraform, and Valkey, a fork of the key-value database Redis. Both projects were created in response to the switch to source-available licenses, which are not open source licenses according to the Open Source Initiative's definition.

(ndi)