[HN Gopher] Elastic and Amazon reach agreement on trademark infr... ___________________________________________________________________ Elastic and Amazon reach agreement on trademark infringement lawsuit Author : dhd415 Score : 63 points Date : 2022-02-16 21:33 UTC (1 hours ago) (HTM) web link (www.elastic.co) (TXT) w3m dump (www.elastic.co) | uji wrote: | Looks like pretty good news. Have worked in AWS before. So AWS is | very famous for making money using open source products without | contributing upstream. | | One very good example is Amazon redis. Amazon figured out that | redis asynchronous replication didn't work at scale so instead of | fixing issues upstream they chose to develop Amazon redis in | house and monetized it. | | https://aws.amazon.com/memorydb/ | | Enhanced version means patched made by AWS. | https://aws.amazon.com/elasticache/redis-details/ | rabuse wrote: | Ahh, the new Oracle. | ignoramous wrote: | At this point in AWS' life, enterprise sales is king. Not | surprising that there's shades of Oracle / Microsoft in them. | May be, Google hired Oracle #2, Thomas Kurian, to head GCP | for similar reasons. Like it or not, Oracle-sized shadow | looms large over BigCloud. | LoveGracePeace wrote: | It surprises me when people lump Oracle (or AWS for that | matter) in with the likes of Microsoft. | adventured wrote: | No, not everything negative is the new Oracle. AWS has very | little in common with how Oracle has operated historically. | | Oracle didn't build their company in the style of AWS Redis, | that cloning maneuver. Oracle's database was a pioneer. | Oracle didn't get where they are by cloning open source and | claiming it as their own. Despite the numerous bad things | that can be said about Oracle's culture, that's not one of | the key negatives about Oracle. | LoveGracePeace wrote: | Agreed. Not an Oracle fan boy but they didn't deserve to be | brought up in the context. | deepsun wrote: | Sometimes fixing upstream is hard / not possible, when | maintainers don't want to accept others' proposals/vision, or | are cautious to change architecture with breaking changes. | DelightOne wrote: | So they don't release the result as OSS because upstream | wouldn't have included it? | WaxProlix wrote: | I was sort of curious, so I went to see what impact this had on | the customer experience at AWS. Searching for 'elasticsearch' in | the AWS console services dropdown now yields: | | ''' Amazon OpenSearch Service (successor to Amazon Elasticsearch | Service) | | Run and Scale OpenSearch and Elasticsearch Clusters (successor to | Amazon Elasticsea... ''' | | This seems like a petty, small win from the Elasticsearch people. | I understand AWS has a history of gobbling up OSS and | productizing it, and that that's detrimental, but it's hard to | see Elastic, Inc as anything but sore that they got their lunch | eaten here. Maybe that's justified. But it comes off as | incredibly petty. | | (disclaimer: i used to work at aws, but not anywhere near the | referenced offerings). | dhd415 wrote: | Wow, it's pretty surprising to me that the agreement allowed | AWS to refer to Elasticsearch at all when promoting their own | managed search offering. | judge2020 wrote: | There's a constant struggle between allowing free speech | versus restricting it via trademark laws. In general, they | want to make sure companies can talk about and mention their | competitors by name and not be silenced by trademark | lawsuits, while still ensuring the trademark isn't being | infringed to the point of confusion. "Amazon Elasticsearch | Service" sounds an awful lot like they have permission to use | the Elasticsearch brand, while simply referring to it in | parentheses indicates it's a competing service to the actual | elasticsearch. | sokoloff wrote: | It's "detrimental" to companies who perhaps shouldn't have | chosen a license that allows AWS to do exactly what they did. | Those companies can't simultaneously claim to be competent and | to have made that choice without knowing what they were doing. | | IMO, they chased the benefits of being open source and then | changed course when the costs to them exceeded the benefits | (which is fine for code going forward), but trademark concerns | aside, I can't see AWS as the bad actor here. | ignoramous wrote: | If anything AWS has increased its co-operation with F/OSS | businesses of late and this clear shift in strategy was | apparent in product / partnership announcements leading up to | 2021 re:Invent. AWS, I believe, realise the F/OSS ecosystem | mustn't be taken undue advantage of. I mean, AWS stands a | good chance of getting caught in a vehement backlash (let | alone sporadic bad PR) from the developer community, who | ironically form the basis of an entire industry AWS sells | into and operates in. | | With Microsoft + GitHub intensifying their investments in | F/OSS, AWS had to play ball. It is smart, not petty on | anyone's part. | | Judging from the tone of the article, I am glad Elastic is | content in their current business relationship with AWS. | Hopefully, the companies also find an agreement to have AWS' | OpenSearch fork merged back in, as well. | | disclaimer: ex-AWS, but zero insider information. | skrtskrt wrote: | This comment is in every thread about this, but there has to | be a solution that satisfies FOSS purists as well as casual | users without allowing a massive, evil megacorp to just stomp | on every company built around open-source solutions. | Salgat wrote: | How is AWS stomping all over it? Being able to fork for | your own needs is a good thing. You don't make something | open source and accept the world's free contributions | without acknowledging that. | zakki wrote: | Except AWS is not forking open source for their own use. | They sell it and get a lot of profit from it. | growse wrote: | > Except AWS is not forking open source for their own | use. They sell it and get a lot of profit from it. | | They sell a hosted service that uses the software. | They're not selling the software. | | Pretty difficult to see how a company building a SaaS | business around some software is not "for their own use". | skrtskrt wrote: | Again, you're leading with the definition-of-FOSS | argument. | | Step back from FOSS for a second. | | I think most people would agree that there's somewhat of | a moral issue with just taking someone else's open source | software and just hosting it and making billions, with | nothing for the creators, because you are a megacorp who | is good at hosting. | | Now, is there a way to solve that and have the benefits | of FOSS? | | Both Mongo and MariaDB have tried to address this with | licensing - MariaDB seems to have done this _much_ less | clumsily than Mongo, but both still had FOSS advocates | shrieking | | Edit to include my below comment: | | If everyone stomps their feet and says "there's no | solution, otherwise it's not OSS!" then the end result is | only going to be a lot less open-source software. | shawnz wrote: | Don't you think there's a moral issue expecting free | contributions to something which only you are allowed to | monetize? And how can you satisfy users to the greatest | extent while also preventing them from using the provider | that is best able to meet their needs? | owenmarshall wrote: | You've got it precisely backwards. The license placed on | a software encodes what you wish to allow other people to | do with it. | | If you have a moral qualm with bigcorps using your work | for free, you don't license in such a way that they can. | Make your own license, or slap AGPL3 on it - either way, | no bigcorp touches it. | | But you cannot be mad when you say "I release this code | under these terms" _and AWS takes you up on your offer_. | bobertlo wrote: | if their service is hosting an open source product maybe | they should be competitive at it | Sebb767 wrote: | > Now, is there a way to solve that and have the benefits | of FOSS? | | The answer is simple - no. Either your product is fully | free and you accept that people can fork iz, even Amazon, | or you choose a restrictive license. You can't make | "free" (as in libre) compatible with "but". | | I can totally see that you think this is unfair, but they | did allow it and they were perfectly happy when being | FOSS brought them market share. You have to take the good | with the bad. | skrtskrt wrote: | If everyone stomps their feet and says "there's no | solution, otherwise it's not OSS!" then the end result is | only going to be a lot less open-source software. | growse wrote: | How is there a moral issue when the software creators | specifically and explicitly granted that right? | mullingitover wrote: | > someone else's open source software | | This feels like an oxymoron: if it's open source licensed | there is explicitly no 'owner.' | growse wrote: | Perhaps they mean the copyright owner? | Nextgrid wrote: | AGPL? | skrtskrt wrote: | AGPL seems to guarantee mostly that you can obtain | changes people are applying downstream in order to host | your software, and apply them back up. | | It does not prevent someone from making billions off of | doing nothing but hosting your software because they are | better than you at hosting. | touisteur wrote: | But, if the value-add is hosting more than the software | itself, why would you prevent the 'value-adder' making | the bulk of the money? | | I'm like OP, trying to take a step back. What do we want | here? As users? As developers? That no one does too much | (or any) money hosting our software for other people | willing to pay? Profit-sharing? On what basis? | | Really, naively, apart from the use of the Elastic brand, | that I might conceive could cause problems, who's hurting | whom? | totony wrote: | Nor should it, that's what OSS is about. Why should they | not do what they want with your software? As long as it | stays open it's OSS | skrtskrt wrote: | Ok, but I am asking is there any solution? | | Is there a way to get the benefits of OSS AND for the | creators to get more then zero dollars when someone makes | a shitload of money off of just putting their software on | an enterprise cloud? | growse wrote: | > Ok, but I am asking is there any solution? | | > Is there a way to get the benefits of OSS AND for the | creators to get more then zero dollars when someone makes | a shitload of money off of just putting their software on | an enterprise cloud? | | You're basically asking if something can be | simultaneously open and not open. | | The benefits come precisely because someone can come | along and create a successful business using your | software without owing you anything. That is the reason | for the benefits. | madeofpalk wrote: | There is. AGPL + dual licensing. | skrtskrt wrote: | How would dual licensing go down, ideally in these cases? | | I figured if that worked, Elastic, Redis, MariaDB, Mongo, | Timescale, and Cockroach Labs would have gone that route | Macha wrote: | Start out that way, and you'll find it harder to build a | user base. So instead companies have done it as a bait | and switch (planned or otherwise) | chrsig wrote: | From what I understand about trademark law, unlike copyright, | trademarks _must_ be defended at risk of losing them. So it may | seem petty, but might actually have some necessity behind it. | | IANAL, and certainly not an expert on trademark law. Hopefully | someone with more legal knowledge can provide some resources. | | Even if it is just petty, it's petty against amazon, and I for | one don't really feel the need to have sympathy for them. | wumpus wrote: | Most people don't really get what trademark defense is -- | having Amazon label the trademark in some places as | "Elasticsearch is a trademark of <whoever>" is enough to | count. Even linking the elasticsearch software repo or | elastic.co in conjunction with the trademark name is enough. | | Source: I have a best-selling book author friend who has been | defending her trademark on a somewhat popular pop-culture | term this way for a few decades. | WaxProlix wrote: | That makes sense. I do sort of wish there were something to | take away from this though that might lead to better outcomes | for future endeavours, so that people could learn from | Elastic's blunder, but if there's anything I don't see it. | sdesol wrote: | Full disclosure: This is my tool that I'm using to generate the | insights. | | When OpenSearch was announced, I shared some insights into how | both Elasticsearch and OpenSearch were evolving, and I'll share | some more up to date insights here. | | Looking at recent pull request activity, OpenSearch had 52 | contributors | | https://oss.gitsense.com/insights/github?q=pull-age%3A%3C%3D... | | while Elasticsearch had 181 | | https://oss.gitsense.com/insights/github?q=pull-age%3A%3C%3D... | | The metric that I'm most interested in, is knowing how many | people committed within the last 14 days compared to those that | committed more than 14 days ago. For Elasticsearch, they had 87 | contributors which accounts for 68% of all contributors. | OpenSearch had 20, which accounts for 67%. With these numbers, I | can ball park how many people are working on Elasticsearch and | OpenSearch full time and I would say Elasticsearch at the present | moment has probably 5 times more people working on it fulltime vs | OpenSearch. | | An important thing to note is, Amazon has other projects that are | related to OpenSearch so these numbers don't necessary give the | full picture, but it is pretty obvious that Elasticsearch is | evolving at a much faster pace and time will tell if they | (OpenSearch) can keep up. | TSiege wrote: | I'll be curious to see what happens as well. I ended up going | with Opensearch since I use AWS. I figured I'm already locked | in to that environment anyways, so why not | sdesol wrote: | Somebody that does consulting work with Elasticsearch | mentioned that they had some pretty innovative features in | the pipeline and these are the things that can really pull | people away from OpenSearch. It could also be that, people | only really want basic search functionality so who knows | right :-) | deknos wrote: | i think that for all the people which just want a logging | system in their k8s, opensearch is pretty good. | | lots of software ist stable and just works. everyone uses | bash. let the elastic guys make their new software more | shiny, good for them. i am now glad i can use a real | opensource version at home and for small to midsized | projects. if opensearch won't cut it? no problem, the | customer can pay elastic :) | CSDude wrote: | Elastic is already a mature product, with little to improve. | Even 8.0 release is focused on speed and footprint. Many | companies still use 2.x happily. License implications are not | worth it. | dhd415 wrote: | Having interacted with Elasticsearch a lot, I assure you | there is a lot for them yet to improve. Frankly, I think | Elasticsearch followed the MongoDB model of "make it easy for | developers to adopt and then make it good." MDB did that by | making it easy to throw "schema-less" documents into their | database and then later working on "advanced" things like | avoiding data loss [0]. Elasticsearch did something similar | in that you don't have to run a separate cluster coordination | server like Zookeeper which Solr requires. It's also easy to | get up and running with indexing unstructured data. Running | it at scale with heavy workloads? There are still plenty of | rough edges there. It's a good way to gain market share and | both products have definitely improved, but I wouldn't want | my day job to involve the operation of a large Elasticsearch | cluster. | | [0] https://pastebin.com/raw/FD3xe6Jt | jbverschoor wrote: | It would be nice if we can get some sort of standard license | agreement for cases like this.. | | It's such a shame that this happened | [deleted] | deknos wrote: | What does this mean for opensearch? | baobabKoodaa wrote: | This announcement is confusing, because it makes no mention of | OpenSearch. The announcement implies that OpenSearch should no | longer be available on AWS, but (of course) it is. | sdesol wrote: | It was announced by elastic and I'm not sure it is in their | best interest to advertise their competitor. ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2022-02-16 23:00 UTC)