Ignite Talk: From Fork to Foundation: The OpenSearch Journey to the Linux Foundation
Building and managing a successful open source project is no small feat, especially when it begins as a fork born out of the need to preserve openness. OpenSearch started as a response to the relicensing of Elasticsearch and Kibana, and over the years, it has grown into a vibrant, community-driven ecosystem. This year’s milestone of joining The Linux Foundation highlights the project’s commitment to open governance, collaboration, and long-term sustainability.
In this session, we’ll share the lessons learned from OpenSearch’s journey, exploring the strategies behind building a healthy, scalable, and inclusive open source community. From establishing clear governance models to fostering innovation with features like vector search and AI-powered capabilities, we’ll provide actionable insights for maintaining momentum and trust in open source projects.
Whether you’re starting a new open source initiative or managing an existing one, this talk offers a practical guide to navigating challenges, ensuring community alignment, and achieving long-term impact—just as OpenSearch has done.
Speaker
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Dotan HorovitsAmazon Web ServicesDotan lives at the intersection of technology, product and open source. With over 20 years in the tech industry as a software developer, a solutions architect and a product manager, he brings a wealth of knowledge in cloud and cloud-native architectures, big data solutions, DevOps practices and more.
Dotan is an international speaker, an Ambassador of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) and of the OpenSearch Software Foundation, and host of the popular OpenObservability Talks podcast.
Currently working as senior developer advocate for the Open Source Strategy & Marketing team at AWS, Horovits evangelizes on the OpenSearch project by the Linux Foundation and on Observability in IT systems.