Elasticsearch and OpenSearch

There is an on-going competition between Elastic and AWS for market share.

There is no need to be ‘siding’ with Elastic on this one.

Differences and Comparison

1. The first thing to understand is Elastic is the name of a company. Elastic is a commercial company just as much as Amazon is.
2. Elastic trying to build a business strategy around an open source product.
3. Elastic Search is the name of an opensource (software) product;
4. Elastic, the company, in no way owns Elastic Search; the open source community does. A very large part of what is ‘in’ Elastic Search is not built by developers paid by Elastic. Elastic, like Solr, is build on top of Lucene, an open source text index.
5. You can’t just go take open source, add to it, and then claim it as your own. If they wanted that, they should have kept Elastic Search closed source. But if it had been closed source, you would never have heard of it.
6. Amazon and Google are building commercial offerings around open source in exactly the same way as Elastic is.
7. OpenSearch is provided by AWS.
8. OpenSearch is Amazon’s fork of Elastic Search for AWS due to the dispute with Elastic.
9. OpenSearch is a fork of Elastic Search solution.
10. Elastic, the company, changed their license from Apache2 to SSPL / Elastic enterprise dual-license.
11. SSPL only stops Amazon and other cloud providers from offering the product as elasticsearch, it’s still open if you are not providing an elasticsearch service. You can still use it unhindered in your product or service as long as it’s not providing elasticsearch as a service.
12. One can argue that Elastic forked their own project and abandoned the open source version and that AWS just picked up the abandoned project.
13. Elastic in a tough spot. They have a killer product that everyone wants to buy … from someone else. This would kind of kill Elastic. Unless they can come up with a defining USP (unique selling proposition) which makes their solution better and more viable, they will just get killed by AWS on two fronts.
    1. An open source front you can self host, and
    2. AWS’ own Elasticsearch as a service.

Elastic’s arguments

1. These posts from Elastic provide more detailed history and comparison notes. They also explain the advantages that one would get by using Elastic instead of OpenSearch. But since these posts are from Elastic, they are probably a bit more biased towards Elasticsearch.
   1. What is OpenSearch? https://www.elastic.co/elasticsearch/opensearch
   2. OpenSearch is not Elasticsearch: https://www.elastic.co/amazon-opensearch-service

AWS’ arguments

AWS’s statement:

The term “open source” has had a specific meaning since it was coined in 1998. Elastic’s assertions that the SSPL is “free and open” are misleading and wrong. They’re trying to claim the benefits of open source, while chipping away at the very definition of open source itself. Their choice of SSPL belies this. SSPL is a non-open source license designed to look like an open source license, blurring the lines between the two. As the Fedora community states, “[to] consider the SSPL to be ‘Free’ or ‘Open Source’ causes [a] shadow to be cast across all other licenses in the FOSS ecosystem.”

In April 2018, when Elastic co-mingled their proprietary licensed software with the ALv2 code, they promised in “We Opened X-Pack”: “We did not change the license of any of the Apache 2.0 code of Elasticsearch, Kibana, Beats, and Logstash — and we never will.” Last week, after reneging on this promise, Elastic updated that same page with a footnote that says “circumstances have changed.”

Elastic knows what they’re doing is fishy. The community has told them this (e.g., see Brasseur, Quinn, DeVault, and Jacob). It’s also why they felt the need to write an additional blustery blog (on top of their initial license change blog) to try to explain their actions as “AWS made us do it.” Most folks aren’t fooled. We didn’t make them do anything. They believe that restricting their license will lock others out of offering managed Elasticsearch services, which will let Elastic build a bigger business. Elastic has a right to change their license, but they should also step up and own their own decision.

Tags

1. Elasticsearch
2. OpenSearch