The Linux Foundation today announced the launch of the OpenSearch Software Foundation, a community-driven initiative that will support the search software, which is used by developers around the world to build search, analytics, observability and vector database applications.

Originally hosted by Amazon Web Services Inc., OpenSearch was founded in 2021 as a community-driven initiative, Carl Meadows, director of product for OpenSearch at AWS, told SiliconANGLE in an interview. It was forked from AWS’ Elasticsearch distributed search and and analytics engine service but released under the open-source Apache license. The company is now transferring the project to The Linux Foundation to form the new initiative to foster its continued growth.

“From the get-go, we planned to build a broad community and be inclusive with a community-driven roadmap and involvement, but it was an AWS-controlled project,” said Meadows. “Since then, the growth has been amazing.”

OpenSearch is a powerful open-source search and analytics engine. It’s designed to handle large volumes of data efficiently and deliver fast, accurate search results. It acts like a scalable digital librarian that can organize, catalog and retrieve information from vast datasets in real time. Its use cases include analyzing logs, building search engines or performing data analytics.

The OpenSearch project has had more than 700 million downloads and thousands of contributions from thousands of contributors. It has more than 200 maintainers on the product working regularly across 25 organizations.

“Search is something we all rely on every day, for both business and consumer purposes, and we look forward to supporting the OpenSearch community and helping them provide powerful search and analytics tools for organizations and individuals around the world,” said Jim Zemlin, executive director of the Linux Foundation.

The new foundation will launch with the support of premier partner members AWS, Uber Technologies Inc. and SAP SE and general members including Canonical Ltd., NetApp Inc.’s Instaclustr, Avien, Aryn Inc. and Portal26. With the support of these partners, the foundation will structure the OpenSearch Project within the Linux Foundation as an open technical project, overseen by a technical steering committee. Meadows said that he would be joining the OpenSearch Foundation’s governing board as the AWS representative.

“There’s a certain number of enterprises that are, at this stage, reticent to invest heavily in vendor-controlled open-source projects,” said Meadows. “By taking this step, we’ve removed what I view as one of the last sort of headwinds to keep the project from really exploding and growing even more.”

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