Elastic said at the time that the reason was to prevent cloud behemoths such as AWS from offering Elasticsearch "as a service" without giving anything back, while also accusing AWS of violating the Elasticsearch trademark. While Elastic later returned Elasticsearch and Kibana to open source by adding AGPL as a licensing option, making up with AWS along the way, OpenSearch has continued forging its own path as an independent open source project — albeit one still closely associated with the technology giant that created it.
Reducing the AWS dependency A major milestone came in September 2024, when AWS transferred OpenSearch to the Linux Foundation, establishing the OpenSearch Software Foundation and placing the project under "vendor-neutral" governance. The move was intended to give other companies greater confidence that they could contribute to OpenSearch without AWS retaining ultimate control over its future. Two years on, OpenSearch shows signs of gaining traction beyond its original backer.
