OpenSearch is a family of software consisting of a

search engine A search engine is a software system that provides hyperlinks to web pages, and other relevant information on World Wide Web, the Web in response to a user's web query, query. The user enters a query in a web browser or a mobile app, and the sea ...

(also named OpenSearch), and ''OpenSearch Dashboards'', a data visualization dashboard for that search engine. It is an open-source project developed by the OpenSearch Software Foundation (a

Linux Foundation The Linux Foundation (LF) is a non-profit organization established in 2000 to support Linux development and open-source software projects. Background The Linux Foundation started as Open Source Development Labs in 2000 to standardize and prom ...

project) written primarily in

Java Java is one of the Greater Sunda Islands in Indonesia. It is bordered by the Indian Ocean to the south and the Java Sea (a part of Pacific Ocean) to the north. With a population of 156.9 million people (including Madura) in mid 2024, proje ...

. As of August 2024, AWS reported that OpenSearch had "tens of thousands" of customers, while Elastic claimed to have over 20,000 subscribers. In the preceding year, OpenSearch had about 50 monthly contributors while ElasticSearch had between 70 and 90.

History

The project was created in 2021 by

Amazon Web Services Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS) is a subsidiary of Amazon.com, Amazon that provides Software as a service, on-demand cloud computing computing platform, platforms and Application programming interface, APIs to individuals, companies, and gover ...

as a fork of

Elasticsearch Elasticsearch is a Search engine (computing), search engine based on Apache Lucene, a free and open-source search engine. It provides a distributed, Multitenancy, multitenant-capable full-text search engine with an HTTP web interface and schema ...

and Kibana after

Elastic NV Elastic NV is a Dutch software company that provides self-managed and software as a service (SaaS) offerings for search, logging, cyber security, observability, analytics, and generative artificial intelligence (AI) use cases. It was founded in 2 ...

changed the

license A license (American English) or licence (Commonwealth English) is an official permission or permit to do, use, or own something (as well as the document of that permission or permit). A license is granted by a party (licensor) to another part ...

of new versions of this software away from the

open-source Open source is source code that is made freely available for possible modification and redistribution. Products include permission to use and view the source code, design documents, or content of the product. The open source model is a decentrali ...

Apache License The Apache License is a permissive free software license written by the Apache Software Foundation (ASF). It allows users to use the software for any purpose, to distribute it, to modify it, and to distribute modified versions of the software ...

in favour of the

Server Side Public License The Server Side Public License (SSPL) is a Source-available software, source-available copyleft software license introduced by MongoDB Inc. in 2018. It includes most of the text and provisions of the GNU Affero General Public License version ...

(SSPL). Amazon would hold sole ownership status and write access to the source code repositories, but invited pull requests from anyone. Other companies such as Logz.io,

CrateDB CrateDB is a distributed SQL database management system that integrates a fully searchable document-oriented data store. It is open-source, written in Java, based on a shared-nothing architecture, and designed for high scalability. CrateDB inclu ...

Red Hat Red Hat, Inc. (formerly Red Hat Software, Inc.) is an American software company that provides open source software products to enterprises and is a subsidiary of IBM. Founded in 1993, Red Hat has its corporate headquarters in Raleigh, North ...

and others announced an interest in building or joining a community to continue using and maintaining this open-source software. On September 16, 2024, the

and

announced the creation of the OpenSearch Software Foundation. Ownership of OpenSearch software was transferred from Amazon to OpenSearch Software Foundation, which is organized as an open technical project within the Linux Foundation. The Linux Foundation reported that at the time, "OpenSearch recorded more than 700 million software downloads and participation from thousands of contributors and more than 200 project maintainers." The OpenSearch Software Foundation would launch with support from premier members

, SAP, and

Uber Uber Technologies, Inc. is an American multinational transportation company that provides Ridesharing company, ride-hailing services, courier services, food delivery, and freight transport. It is headquartered in San Francisco, California, a ...

Projects

OpenSearch

OpenSearch is a

Lucene Apache Lucene is a free and open-source search engine software library, originally written in Java by Doug Cutting. It is supported by the Apache Software Foundation and is released under the Apache Software License. Lucene is widely used as a ...

-based

that started as a fork of version 7.10.2 of the

service. It has Elastic NV trademarks and telemetry removed. It is licensed under the

, version 2, without a Contributor License Agreement. The maintainers have made a commitment to remain completely compatible with Elasticsearch in its initial versions.

OpenSearch Dashboards

OpenSearch Dashboards started as a fork of version 7.10.2 of Elastic's Kibana software, and is also under the

, version 2.

References

External links