AWS wrote 72% of OpenSearch's commits last year — buyers are taking notes

OpenSearch started life as a grudge fork. In January 2021, Elastic had just moved Elasticsearch and Kibana away from Apache 2.0 — officially to stop AWS selling Elasticsearch as a service without giving anything back — and AWS answered by forking Elasticsearch 7.10 and calling the result OpenSearch. Five years on, fresh survey data from the Linux Foundation suggests the grudge has curdled into something more interesting: a project spending its second act trying to prove it no longer belongs to the company that made it.

The numbers, supplied to The New Stack by the OpenSearch Software Foundation, trace a slow dilution of AWS. Its share of contribution activity across OpenSearch's repositories has fallen from 91% in the project's first year to 72% in 2025-26, and Amazon-affiliated maintainers in the core repository dropped from 95% in 2022 to 71% today. Adoption tells a similar story: self-managed deployments are outpacing Amazon's managed OpenSearch Service, with 60% of surveyed users now running self-managed in the cloud, up from 37% in 2024, while the managed service only crept from 44% to 48%. That is what a project finding other parents looks like. Yet 24% of surveyed non-adopters still name OpenSearch's AWS history as a reason to stay away, and while AWS holds just four of the fifteen voting seats on the Technical Steering Committee, it just re-elected its own employee, Andrew Ross, as committee chair in October.

Bianca Lewis, the foundation's executive director, is blunt about the origin — early OpenSearch was, in her words, Elasticsearch with a different name, same plugins, borrowed documentation — and frames the September 2024 donation to the Linux Foundation as the point of no return: AWS can no longer close the project or relicense it. Her commercial logic is equally plain: AWS makes money from compute, not from owning applications, so operating OpenSearch forever was never the plan. The gap is that governance and trust move at different speeds. Companies with three-year Splunk contracts or five-year Elastic licenses are evaluating OpenSearch alongside what they already paid for, and an evaluation is not a migration.

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The practical takeaway is to treat vendor neutrality as an engineering input, not marketing wallpaper. If you are sizing a search or observability stack, the question worth asking is the one Lewis asks: what does leaving look like, and do you have to rearchitect your applications to do it? Then audit your own footprint. If your OpenSearch deployment lives entirely on the AWS managed service with IAM glue welded everywhere, you have picked a vendor-neutral project and implemented it vendor-specifically — and neutrality is only worth as much as your ability to actually walk away.

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For those running search or observability in-house: does vendor-neutral governance actually show up in your buying criteria, or does it not matter as long as queries are fast? If you moved off a commercial stack because of lock-in, did the exit genuinely work — or did you just trade one landlord for another?

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