We’re just migrating to OpenSearch from Xapian and it was one of the question we had. We didn’t want to go from a solution in maintenance mode to one which could be a dead end soon.
From what we’ve seen there is lots of active development going on with many features being added.
But we don’t yet use any fancy features and could easily switch to ElasticSearch if need be. So we got a backup plan.
> But we don’t yet use any fancy features and could easily switch to ElasticSearch if need be.
I think the decision paralysis is the big deal here. I have the exact same situation with OpenTofu and Terraform, they're diverging rapidly yet it's not entirely clear which way the wind is blowing. They both now have compelling and interesting features that the other doesn't have.
So the outcome is that I'm now not using any new features.
In practice, and I'm extremely biased here, I'd consider the most risk-averse option to be going with OpenTofu but not using any of its exclusive new features. With this you get dependency updates and the widest competitive range of vendors in case you ever want to use a commercial orchestrator service for it.
However, it seems to me folks at companies of all sizes are increasingly deciding to bite the bullet and migrate, esp. since the last release a couple months ago. E.g. see the talk by Fidelity[0] on OpenTofu Day at Kubecon.
From what we’ve seen there is lots of active development going on with many features being added.
But we don’t yet use any fancy features and could easily switch to ElasticSearch if need be. So we got a backup plan.