19 ms·

OpenSearch 1.0

143 points by dade 5y ago

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
Semaphor 5y ago
> OpenSearch is a community-driven, open source search and analytics suite derived from Apache 2.0 licensed Elasticsearch 7.10.2 & Kibana 7.10.2. It consists of a search engine daemon, OpenSearch, and a visualization and user interface, OpenSearch Dashboards. from the main page. So it’s essentially ES before they switched to a new license.
- jjeaff 5y ago
  I believe it also includes some plugins that were not included in the open source version of ES. One being security, that allows you to create user accounts and grant access. Another being anomaly detection.
- jillesvangurp 5y ago
  Yes, not a lot of changes. I've been digging through the commit logs to see if this project is attracting new developers. There's a little bit but most of it is trivial stuff. So, not a lot yet. As a long term Elasticsearch user, I don't like their move away from OSS. I think its long term bad for them and it puts me on the spot when I have to consult my customers on what to use. And yes, I've already had a few conversations on this topic. People seem to prefer OSS and this whole thing makes them default to opensearch/aws. It's hard arguing with that. Whatever Elastic says, it's a closed source license now and it largely cuts them off from external contributions. At least, I don't tend to make closed source contributions for free. Which is a shame. Whether Amazon can turn this project in what it claims to be already: a thriving oss community, remains to be seen. As of yet it's basically a largely unmodified fork with not a whole lot of feature work happening (if any at all). Turning that around is going to require some skilled external contributors to join. At least, I don't see the current team achieving a whole lot as it appears to be rather small and most of their work so far has been tinkering with the build system and editing some licensing texts. The good news is that 7.10.2 was a fine version. The bad news is that this fork is not getting the fixes, improvements, and performance work that mainline Elasticsearch is getting. Also, Elasticsearch 8.x at some point will become a thing and is likely to have some improvements. It's actually been unusually long since the last major release. Before 7.0 they had major releases every year. Of course, moving to new versions of Lucene will be a some non trivial work in terms of implementing and testing the changes. At some point the forks will diverge or opensearch will simply fall behind. The latter seems to be happening. Elasticsearch. 7.11-7.13 have added a few new features that opensearch won't have. They forked the code but not the developer community. Not yet at least. That could just be a matter of time. IMHO Elastic should kill this fork by rolling back their license changes. There's nothing to backport from this that is worth keeping as far as I can see. So, not a big change technically. Not too late to admit they are simply wrong. They seem to have dug in on this so probably not going to happen. But one can hope.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
- matkoniecz 5y ago
  "community-driven" Somehow I have doubts about this part.
  - easton 5y ago
    With OpenSearch, you can start your own community and drive it, whereas with Elastic you can't unless you're willing to promise your fork won't get resold as a hosted service. In all seriousness, is Amazon good about accepting PRs and stuff from volunteers for their oss projects (i.e. Firecracker)?
    - lornajane 5y ago
      So far, Amazon have been good about accepting PRs from volunteers (I can only vouch for the OpenSearch project) and have committed to moving to a more open source model with active maintainers from other organisations. It's early days but it looks healthy so far.
politician 5y ago
OpenSearch is the AWS fork of ElasticSearch prior to the license change aimed at preventing AWS from copying Elastic IP without compensation.
- fastball 5y ago
  > copying Elastic IP without compensation is a bit of a strange way of saying "selling ElasticSearch as a service".
  - politician 5y ago
    Is it? Maybe I've been talking to too many lawyers lately.
    - CRConrad 5y ago
      > Maybe I've been talking to too many lawyers lately. Only to be expected, with that nick.
- usr1106 5y ago
  Sorry, do not follow that area. Can someone explain to the uninvolved? Who changed from which license to which? The owner of the code can of course change the license. But in typical open source projects there are 100s of contributors, so changing the license can be anything between a major job and impossible.
  - google234123 5y ago
    There's been a lot of discussion on this already: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=pastYear&page=0&prefix=false&query=ElasticSearch&sort=byPopularity&type=story https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=pastYear&page=0&prefix=fal...
  - kevinbowman 5y ago
    If there’s only one owner, either through limiting the contributions or through insisting on a CLA, then that owner can do what they like moving forwards. They can’t change things retrospectively, though.
dang 5y ago
Recent and related: OpenSearch: AWS fork of Elasticsearch and Kibana - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26780848 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26780848 - April 2021 (424 comments)
piokoch 5y ago
So this is Amazon rip-off (legal one, obviously) of the last Elasticseartch version having Apache license... On the one hand, this is ok. Free software is taken and extended by someone who wants to do this... Yet, I am not sure if in that particular case this follows the spirit of the free software. This move will probably kill company behind Elasticsearch sooner or later. Amazon is making money not on selling particular piece of software but on selling hosting of it. So they gladly give OpenSearch "for free". Elasticsearch company produced pretty great product, they wanted to earn some bucks on additional features (I think alerts were only in paid version) and cloud hosting for rather reasonable price. And here came AWS, took their product to sell it as their own. This does not sound fair. Long term consequences of this kind approach from big players are going to be bad. We will get less free software since everyone who wants to develop new product of this kind will have a choice: - start with more restrictive license (like AGPL) and risk that nobody will even look on their new product - start with "business-friendly" license like Apache, MIT and risk that if their product will become popular and profitable it will be cannibalized by AWS, etc. I wish Elasticsearch people good luck, hopefully, with the competitive pricing and ability to work faster/leaner on their product they will survive, they definitely deserve that.
- thefurrysquid 5y ago
  Elastic are a $13 billion company. They get little sympathy from me. They built that value off the back of many other open source products, and with help from the community - all under licenses like Apache 2.0 and MIT. And now, after building all that value by selling Enterprise and SaaS versions of the software, they decided to specifically target their competitor who was doing the exact same thing. Without Lucene, there would have been no ElasticSearch. Why does ElasticSearch get to take all the hard work done by Lucene contributors and sell it as part of their own product? This does not sound fair... in the terms you put it. If this hurts Elastic, they did it to themselves. They don't deserve your support.
  - polskibus 5y ago
    Just remember that their valuation does not represent their free cash flow, whether they are profitable at all, etc. It could be that open sourcing something kills your profitability in the back, while boosting revenue.
chrismorgan 5y ago
OpenSearch 1.0 was released 16 years ago. Even by an Amazon subsidiary. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenSearch https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenSearch Alas, that thing called OpenSearch is just about dead now.
- joshuaissac 5y ago
  Still works in Firefox for Desktop. They dropped support for the pop-ups for installing OpenSearch plugins but still support the link relations method. The OpenSearch plugin repository at the Mycroft Project looks like it is still maintained: https://mycroftproject.com/ https://mycroftproject.com/
- rmetzler 5y ago
  It’s still one of the most useful things in my opinion. And I think it’s also still working. To be able to have a custom short cut in Chrome’s bar and use it to seamlessly go to any website’s search results page is such a great feature.
karterk 5y ago
As a maintainer of another open-source search project (https://github.com/typesense/typesense https://github.com/typesense/typesense), this whole saga has left a pretty sour taste. At the end of the day, being truly committed to open source is difficult once you start feeling the revenue pressure. The very openness of the license that drives the growth of the project and the community in the early days becomes an albatross around your neck. Once you have raised a lot of money, there is tremendous pressure sooner or later to own the market and to justify the insane revenue multiples at which many companies are raising. It's a delicate path. If you set the expectations right, I think the Cloud market is large enough to accommodate several companies in most verticals. However, "growth at all costs" requires walking back on your ideals and promises.
wg0 5y ago
IMHO - This is on Elastic itself. AWS is not the only place or mandatory place to run Elastic search. There are tons of other cloud vendors, on premise farms and what not. That was more than enough for Elastic to be profitable in polishing their offerings for everything minus may be the 3 big cloud players. This also goes for Mongo. The pricing at least was not clear to me for a deployment, I clearly and precisely articulated the amount of data and already 3 node MongoDB Cluster we have but the sales rep continued to insist on jumping on a call. Here's the thing - what is so difficult about pricing that you cannot write a one liner saying XXX dollars per YY nodes per ZZ period? I vaguely remember, it turned about to be around about 2.5k USD per month whereas infrastructure cost was to be yet paid by us.
- mercora 5y ago
  > what is so difficult about pricing that you cannot write a one liner saying XXX dollars per YY nodes per ZZ period? i always suspect the pricing is dependent on your budget and they want to figure out the amount of your budget before giving a quote...
  - wg0 5y ago
    Exactly - now I don't know if that's ethical and predatory or not but it surely is discriminatory pricing for sure.
bugmen0t 5y ago
Not to be confused with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenSearch https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenSearch.
xtanx 5y ago
I understand the reasoning behind the license change for elastic search / kibana and the rest of the server side products. But why did they have to change the license for Eui [0]. It is a real shame because it is amazing for building admin UIs. [0] https://github.com/elastic/eui/ https://github.com/elastic/eui/

143 points by dade 5y ago

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

> OpenSearch is a community-driven, open source search and analytics suite derived from Apache 2.0 licensed Elasticsearch 7.10.2 & Kibana 7.10.2. It consists of a search engine daemon, OpenSearch, and a visualization and user interface, OpenSearch Dashboards. from the main page. So it’s essentially ES before they switched to a new license.

jjeaff 5y ago
I believe it also includes some plugins that were not included in the open source version of ES. One being security, that allows you to create user accounts and grant access. Another being anomaly detection.
jillesvangurp 5y ago
Yes, not a lot of changes. I've been digging through the commit logs to see if this project is attracting new developers. There's a little bit but most of it is trivial stuff. So, not a lot yet. As a long term Elasticsearch user, I don't like their move away from OSS. I think its long term bad for them and it puts me on the spot when I have to consult my customers on what to use. And yes, I've already had a few conversations on this topic. People seem to prefer OSS and this whole thing makes them default to opensearch/aws. It's hard arguing with that. Whatever Elastic says, it's a closed source license now and it largely cuts them off from external contributions. At least, I don't tend to make closed source contributions for free. Which is a shame. Whether Amazon can turn this project in what it claims to be already: a thriving oss community, remains to be seen. As of yet it's basically a largely unmodified fork with not a whole lot of feature work happening (if any at all). Turning that around is going to require some skilled external contributors to join. At least, I don't see the current team achieving a whole lot as it appears to be rather small and most of their work so far has been tinkering with the build system and editing some licensing texts. The good news is that 7.10.2 was a fine version. The bad news is that this fork is not getting the fixes, improvements, and performance work that mainline Elasticsearch is getting. Also, Elasticsearch 8.x at some point will become a thing and is likely to have some improvements. It's actually been unusually long since the last major release. Before 7.0 they had major releases every year. Of course, moving to new versions of Lucene will be a some non trivial work in terms of implementing and testing the changes. At some point the forks will diverge or opensearch will simply fall behind. The latter seems to be happening. Elasticsearch. 7.11-7.13 have added a few new features that opensearch won't have. They forked the code but not the developer community. Not yet at least. That could just be a matter of time. IMHO Elastic should kill this fork by rolling back their license changes. There's nothing to backport from this that is worth keeping as far as I can see. So, not a big change technically. Not too late to admit they are simply wrong. They seem to have dug in on this so probably not going to happen. But one can hope.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
matkoniecz 5y ago
"community-driven" Somehow I have doubts about this part.
- easton 5y ago
  With OpenSearch, you can start your own community and drive it, whereas with Elastic you can't unless you're willing to promise your fork won't get resold as a hosted service. In all seriousness, is Amazon good about accepting PRs and stuff from volunteers for their oss projects (i.e. Firecracker)?
  - lornajane 5y ago
    So far, Amazon have been good about accepting PRs from volunteers (I can only vouch for the OpenSearch project) and have committed to moving to a more open source model with active maintainers from other organisations. It's early days but it looks healthy so far.

politician 5y ago

OpenSearch is the AWS fork of ElasticSearch prior to the license change aimed at preventing AWS from copying Elastic IP without compensation.

fastball 5y ago
> copying Elastic IP without compensation is a bit of a strange way of saying "selling ElasticSearch as a service".
- politician 5y ago
  Is it? Maybe I've been talking to too many lawyers lately.
  - CRConrad 5y ago
    > Maybe I've been talking to too many lawyers lately. Only to be expected, with that nick.
usr1106 5y ago
Sorry, do not follow that area. Can someone explain to the uninvolved? Who changed from which license to which? The owner of the code can of course change the license. But in typical open source projects there are 100s of contributors, so changing the license can be anything between a major job and impossible.
- google234123 5y ago
  There's been a lot of discussion on this already: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=pastYear&page=0&prefix=false&query=ElasticSearch&sort=byPopularity&type=story https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=pastYear&page=0&prefix=fal...
- kevinbowman 5y ago
  If there’s only one owner, either through limiting the contributions or through insisting on a CLA, then that owner can do what they like moving forwards. They can’t change things retrospectively, though.

dang 5y ago

Recent and related: OpenSearch: AWS fork of Elasticsearch and Kibana - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26780848 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26780848 - April 2021 (424 comments)

piokoch 5y ago

So this is Amazon rip-off (legal one, obviously) of the last Elasticseartch version having Apache license... On the one hand, this is ok. Free software is taken and extended by someone who wants to do this... Yet, I am not sure if in that particular case this follows the spirit of the free software. This move will probably kill company behind Elasticsearch sooner or later. Amazon is making money not on selling particular piece of software but on selling hosting of it. So they gladly give OpenSearch "for free". Elasticsearch company produced pretty great product, they wanted to earn some bucks on additional features (I think alerts were only in paid version) and cloud hosting for rather reasonable price. And here came AWS, took their product to sell it as their own. This does not sound fair. Long term consequences of this kind approach from big players are going to be bad. We will get less free software since everyone who wants to develop new product of this kind will have a choice: - start with more restrictive license (like AGPL) and risk that nobody will even look on their new product - start with "business-friendly" license like Apache, MIT and risk that if their product will become popular and profitable it will be cannibalized by AWS, etc. I wish Elasticsearch people good luck, hopefully, with the competitive pricing and ability to work faster/leaner on their product they will survive, they definitely deserve that.

thefurrysquid 5y ago
Elastic are a $13 billion company. They get little sympathy from me. They built that value off the back of many other open source products, and with help from the community - all under licenses like Apache 2.0 and MIT. And now, after building all that value by selling Enterprise and SaaS versions of the software, they decided to specifically target their competitor who was doing the exact same thing. Without Lucene, there would have been no ElasticSearch. Why does ElasticSearch get to take all the hard work done by Lucene contributors and sell it as part of their own product? This does not sound fair... in the terms you put it. If this hurts Elastic, they did it to themselves. They don't deserve your support.
- polskibus 5y ago
  Just remember that their valuation does not represent their free cash flow, whether they are profitable at all, etc. It could be that open sourcing something kills your profitability in the back, while boosting revenue.

chrismorgan 5y ago

OpenSearch 1.0 was released 16 years ago. Even by an Amazon subsidiary. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenSearch https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenSearch Alas, that thing called OpenSearch is just about dead now.

joshuaissac 5y ago
Still works in Firefox for Desktop. They dropped support for the pop-ups for installing OpenSearch plugins but still support the link relations method. The OpenSearch plugin repository at the Mycroft Project looks like it is still maintained: https://mycroftproject.com/ https://mycroftproject.com/
rmetzler 5y ago
It’s still one of the most useful things in my opinion. And I think it’s also still working. To be able to have a custom short cut in Chrome’s bar and use it to seamlessly go to any website’s search results page is such a great feature.

karterk 5y ago

As a maintainer of another open-source search project (https://github.com/typesense/typesense https://github.com/typesense/typesense), this whole saga has left a pretty sour taste. At the end of the day, being truly committed to open source is difficult once you start feeling the revenue pressure. The very openness of the license that drives the growth of the project and the community in the early days becomes an albatross around your neck. Once you have raised a lot of money, there is tremendous pressure sooner or later to own the market and to justify the insane revenue multiples at which many companies are raising. It's a delicate path. If you set the expectations right, I think the Cloud market is large enough to accommodate several companies in most verticals. However, "growth at all costs" requires walking back on your ideals and promises.

wg0 5y ago

IMHO - This is on Elastic itself. AWS is not the only place or mandatory place to run Elastic search. There are tons of other cloud vendors, on premise farms and what not. That was more than enough for Elastic to be profitable in polishing their offerings for everything minus may be the 3 big cloud players. This also goes for Mongo. The pricing at least was not clear to me for a deployment, I clearly and precisely articulated the amount of data and already 3 node MongoDB Cluster we have but the sales rep continued to insist on jumping on a call. Here's the thing - what is so difficult about pricing that you cannot write a one liner saying XXX dollars per YY nodes per ZZ period? I vaguely remember, it turned about to be around about 2.5k USD per month whereas infrastructure cost was to be yet paid by us.

mercora 5y ago
> what is so difficult about pricing that you cannot write a one liner saying XXX dollars per YY nodes per ZZ period? i always suspect the pricing is dependent on your budget and they want to figure out the amount of your budget before giving a quote...
- wg0 5y ago
  Exactly - now I don't know if that's ethical and predatory or not but it surely is discriminatory pricing for sure.

bugmen0t 5y ago

Not to be confused with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenSearch https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenSearch.

xtanx 5y ago

I understand the reasoning behind the license change for elastic search / kibana and the rest of the server side products. But why did they have to change the license for Eui [0]. It is a real shame because it is amazing for building admin UIs. [0] https://github.com/elastic/eui/ https://github.com/elastic/eui/