I was scared away as a plugin developer when Elastic changed to closed source, because the plugin that I assembled was based on third-party code and can only licensed under AGPL. Fun fact is, I could now resume my plugin development, and provide the code in the open with future Elasticsearch versions. But will I do it? I am also frustrated and my trust was violated.
The point is, having Opensearch as an alternative is finding answers to my question to resume Elasticsearch development not easier than before. All the positive aspects are still counting for Opensearch. It is true that AGPL is not enough.
While I do not think there will ever be an effort by the Elastic company to join Opensearch or embrace the Opensearch community, it seems to me the license switch to AGPL was driven by the analysis that Elastic's product offering can not be copied any more by hyperscalers. It was a mere question of the exclusiveness of the cloud service offering. That collided with the Apache license once. But now, it is clear that Amazon will never switch back to the Elastic stack as their primary cloud service search product.
The point is, having Opensearch as an alternative is finding answers to my question to resume Elasticsearch development not easier than before. All the positive aspects are still counting for Opensearch. It is true that AGPL is not enough.
While I do not think there will ever be an effort by the Elastic company to join Opensearch or embrace the Opensearch community, it seems to me the license switch to AGPL was driven by the analysis that Elastic's product offering can not be copied any more by hyperscalers. It was a mere question of the exclusiveness of the cloud service offering. That collided with the Apache license once. But now, it is clear that Amazon will never switch back to the Elastic stack as their primary cloud service search product.