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Amazon: Not OK – Why we had to change Elastic licensing

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Re: Amazon: Not OK – Why we had to change Elastic licensing

#41

Post by kmeisthax »

rkangel wrote: post #2

I assume the trademark thing should be a slam dunk? That seems like the most blatant trademark violation ever.

Trademark law is complicated enough that I can imagine several scenarios where owning "Elastic" does not allow you to prescribe Amazon's use of "Elasticsearch Service", or at least where there's enough of a question of law as to allow the matter to proceed to rather expensive litigation.

Also:

>Our efforts to resolve the problem with Amazon failed, forcing us to file a lawsuit. NOT OK.

This and several other sentences alleging illegal behavior on the part of Amazon seem suspicious to me. When I hear someone say that they had to sue another company, but provide no further details of the suit, then I can only assume that their lawsuit was summarily dismissed by the judge. Otherwise, they'd talk about the litigation - there is no legal condition I could think of where you would be allowed to disclose the existence of a lawsuit and make general allegations about a company, but not disclose the existence of at least a settlement agreement, if not a legal judgment.

Does anyone know if Elastic's Amazon lawsuit went anywhere?

Re: Amazon: Not OK – Why we had to change Elastic licensing

#42

Post by patrickaljord »

Jonnax wrote: post #18
patrickaljord wrote: post #9

Their license literally says they have the right to use this code as they're doing, shouldn't be mad at them for that. Imagine putting a sign on your lawn that says people can walk on your lawn and are even allowed to poop on it if they feel like it and then getting mad at them when they do so. That being said, I support their right to change their license to whatever they like if it helps them survive as a business…

These things seem like Amazon went beyond just selling their hosted version of Elasticstack: "When the service launched, imagine our surprise when the Amazon CTO tweeted that the service was released in collaboration with us. It was not. And over the years, we have heard repeatedly that this confusion persists. NOT OK." "So imagine our surprise when Amazon launched their service in 2015 based on Elasticsearch and cal…

> "When the service launched, imagine our surprise when the Amazon CTO tweeted that the service was released in collaboration with us. It was not. And over the years, we have heard repeatedly that this confusion persists. NOT OK."

This just means their CTO was sloppy, Amazon legal department would have never allowed that tweet.

> "So imagine our surprise when Amazon launched their service in 2015 based on Elasticsearch and called it Amazon Elasticsearch Service. We consider this to be a pretty obvious trademark violation. NOT OK."

This is a trademark violation indeed though IANAL, it doesn't require a change to the license to attack them for that. Definitely an abuse of power by Amazon though, completely not ok as they don't care about paying a fine for that, they have all the money in the world. But again, not related to the license thing.

> "When Amazon announced their Open Distro for Elasticsearch fork, they used code that we believe was copied by a third party from our commercial code and provided it as part of the Open Distro project. We believe this further divided our community and drove additional confusion. "

Elastic was known to mix proprietary and open source code and it got to a point where few people knew what was open source and what was not. Many people were not happy with this situation and elastic.co was abusing the situation to charge paid licenses as people were scared of using proprietary code without knowing. The work amazon did to remove all proprietary code from they fork was actually welcomed by the community though I'm not surprised they missed some as it was really hard to tell.

Re: Amazon: Not OK – Why we had to change Elastic licensing

#43

Post by phendrenad2 »

Switching to SSPL feels more like retribution than a fix for the problem. But sadly nothing can be done if Amazon is willing to flagrantly steal your trademark.

At least switching to SSPL might bubble the related trademark issue up to a higher-paid set of lawyers within the Amazon monstrosity, and maybe it'll get resolved.

Re: Amazon: Not OK – Why we had to change Elastic licensing

#44

Post by brlewis »

sokoloff wrote: post #21
rkangel wrote: post #2

I assume the trademark thing should be a slam dunk? That seems like the most blatant trademark violation ever.

It seems to me (not a lawyer) that “Amazon Elastic Search Service” would be OK in a way that “Amazon Elasticsearch Service” would not. (AWS had EC2 before Elastic’s trademark was registered.)

I'm not a lawyer either, but as I understand it, a trademark is violated if it's likely to confuse people into thinking the product/service is from the trademark holder when it actually isn't. If Amazon's CEO experienced such confusion himself, that does sound like a slam dunk to me.

FTA: When the service launched, imagine our surprise when the Amazon CTO tweeted that the service was released in collaboration with us. It was not. And over the years, we have heard repeatedly that this confusion persists. NOT OK.

Re: Amazon: Not OK – Why we had to change Elastic licensing

#45

Post by josho »

This is fine.

No seriously. Hear me out.

If you are a proponent of capitalism then this is how the system works.

The little fish grow into big fish. The big fish eat the little fish. The ecosystem suffers.

It has always been this way. Many of us remember Microsoft in the nineties. Fewer will remember the phone or oil industry doing the same.

Don’t fight this issue. Fight the system that tolerates this pattern. Money in politics, high cost of litigation are both the real concerns.

Re: Amazon: Not OK – Why we had to change Elastic licensing

#46

Post by elliekelly »

granzymes wrote: post #34
dhd415 wrote: post #10

Elastic's other blog post with a clarification about their recent license change is also interesting: https://www.elastic.co/blog/license-change-clarification . Apparently, they're considering further license changes such as MariaDB's Business Source License in which code is usable for anything other than offering the product itself as a service but becomes fully open source (including SaaS) after 3-5 years. That mak…

Thank you. I skimmed the linked article and saw only ranting. Maybe we can change the link to this post?

I read the whole linked article and was disappointed there was no explanation of the license changes they made - only justifications for the change.

Re: Amazon: Not OK – Why we had to change Elastic licensing

#47

Post by eznzt »

Jonnax wrote: post #18
patrickaljord wrote: post #9

Their license literally says they have the right to use this code as they're doing, shouldn't be mad at them for that. Imagine putting a sign on your lawn that says people can walk on your lawn and are even allowed to poop on it if they feel like it and then getting mad at them when they do so. That being said, I support their right to change their license to whatever they like if it helps them survive as a business…

These things seem like Amazon went beyond just selling their hosted version of Elasticstack: "When the service launched, imagine our surprise when the Amazon CTO tweeted that the service was released in collaboration with us. It was not. And over the years, we have heard repeatedly that this confusion persists. NOT OK." "So imagine our surprise when Amazon launched their service in 2015 based on Elasticsearch and cal…

> "So imagine our surprise when Amazon launched their service in 2015 based on Elasticsearch and called it Amazon Elasticsearch Service. We consider this to be a pretty obvious trademark violation. NOT OK."

I don't understand. If I have an ISP and I offer mysql servers, can't I call that offering "Eznzt MySQL Service"?

Re: Amazon: Not OK – Why we had to change Elastic licensing

#48

Post by NeutronStar »

patrickaljord wrote: post #24
shawnz wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think the person you are replying to is making any kind of argument about legality. I think they are saying that when you tell people something is acceptable, then they can only assume it actually is acceptable to you.

Exactly, what Amazon did isn't just legal, it is explicitly specified as OK by the license that the elastic search team selected for their code.

"So imagine our surprise when Amazon launched their service in 2015 based on Elasticsearch and called it Amazon Elasticsearch Service. We consider this to be a pretty obvious trademark violation. NOT OK."

Is that legal by your standards?

Re: Amazon: Not OK – Why we had to change Elastic licensing

#49

Post by signal11 »

z77dj3kl wrote: post #38

"And to be clear, this change most likely has zero effect on you, our users. It has no effect on our customers that engage with us either in cloud or on premises." No, that's just not true. So many users, from small hobby side-projects, to large open source projects, and mega-corps care about the licensing of dependencies, each for their own reason, and will not want to build on top of proprietary software that impos…

If you're a paying customer, you are probably fine.

If you're using SSPL'd Elastic (or Mongo DB, the risks are the same) for anything serious -- i.e. beyond a hobby, get legal advice ASAP.

SSPL isn't an OSI certified license; many would call it at best a 'shared source' license because of the riders attached.

[DELETED because, as user `gpm` points out, OSI doesn't own 'open source' as a trademark, sorry about that -- the need for legal advice doesn't go away, however.] In fact given their kvetching about Amazon and their trademark, Elastic's cheerleading of open source in this and the original blog post seems to be a bit misleading and doing OSI's trademark a disservice.[/DELETED]

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