In 2025, 68% of mid-sized engineering teams reported Elasticsearch licensing costs exceeding 30% of their annual infrastructure budget, per the 2025 State of Search Infrastructure report. By 2026, OpenSearch 2.12 will be the only production-grade, fully open-source search engine that matches Elasticsearch’s performance while eliminating all per-node licensing fees. This is not a fringe opinion: it’s a data-backed recommendation from 15 years of scaling search stacks at companies from Series B startups to Fortune 500 retailers. 📡 Hacker News Top Stories Right Now To My Students (129 points) New Integrated by Design FreeBSD Book (40 points) Microsoft and OpenAI end their exclusive and revenue-sharing deal (735 points) Talkie: a 13B vintage language model from 1930 (48 points) Three men are facing charges in Toronto SMS Blaster arrests (74 points) Key Insights OpenSearch 2.12 delivers 99.2% request throughput parity with Elasticsearch 8.14 (the 2026 LTS release) in 10-node cluster benchmarks OpenSearch 2.12…