Amazon unveiled the creation of your new search platform called "OpenSearch" which was forked from Elasticsearch which is a search, analysis and storage tool.
Opensearch was forked from the Elasticsearch 7.10.2 codebase and officially, work on the fork began on January 21, after which the forked code was cleaned up of components that were not distributed under the Apache 2.0 license and the Elasticsearch branded items were replaced by OpenSearch.
Opensearch will be developed as a collaborative project developed with the participation of the community. It is noted that Amazon is currently the curator of the project, but in the future, together with the community, an optimal strategy will be developed for the management, decision-making and interaction of the participants involved in the development.
Companies such as Red Hat, SAP, Capital One and Logz.io have already joined the OpenSearch work. Notably, the company Logz.io previously tried to develop its own Elasticsearch fork, but joined the work on a common project.
To participate in the development of OpenSearch, it is not necessary to sign a property rights transfer agreement (CLA, Contributor License Agreement), and the rules for using the OpenSearch trademark are permissive and allow you to specify this name when promoting their products.
The reason of the bifurcationn was the transfer of the original Elasticsearch project to an SSPL license (Server Side Public License) not free and the termination of the publication changes under the old license Apache 2.0.
The SSPL has been found by the OSI Open Source (Open Source Initiative) ineligible due to discriminatory requirements. In particular, despite the fact that the SSPL license is based on AGPLv3, the text contains additional requirements for the delivery under the SSPL license not only of the code of the application itself, but also of the source code of all the components involved in the provision. of the cloud service.
Today, we are introducing the OpenSearch project, a community-driven open source fork of Elasticsearch and Kibana. We are making a long-term investment in OpenSearch to ensure that users continue to have an open source search and analytics suite of high quality and secure with a roadmap rich of new and innovative functionalities.
Includes features such as enterprise security, alerts, machine learning, SQL, index health management, and more. All OpenSearch project software is released under the Apache license, version 2.0 (ALv2). We invite you to consult the code of OpenSearch and OpenSearch Dashboards. on GitHub and join us and the growing community around this effort.
As motivation to create the fork, the intention is to keep Elasticsearch and Kibana as open projects and provide an open solution full-fledged, developed with community participation.
The OpenSearch project will also continue the independent development of the Open Distro distribution for Elasticsearch, which was previously developed together with Expedia Group and Netflix in the form of a plug-in on top of Elasticsearch and included additional features.
In addition to the replacement of paid Elasticsearch components such as machine learning tools, SQL support, claim generation, cluster performance diagnostics mechanisms, authentication via Active Directory, Kerberos, SAML and OpenID, implementation of a start point of single session (SSO), traffic encryption support, role-based system access control (RBAC), detailed logging for auditing.
In its current form, the code is still in alpha testing stage and the first beta version is expected in a few weeks. It is planned to stabilize the code base and make OpenSearch ready for use on production systems by mid-2021.
The code is distributed under the Apache 2.0 license and Amazon mentions that it plans to change the name of Amazon Elasticsearch Service to Amazon OpenSearch Service.
Finally, if you are interested in knowing more about it you can check the following link.