Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

elastic.co

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

121–130 of 708 posts

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

#121

Post by hodgesrm »

luisfmh wrote: post #80
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…

So what should we be using instead of elasticsearch for logs? To mitigate that licensing risk?

ClickHouse. It's Apache 2.0 and will stay that way.

Edit to add disclaimer: I work on ClickHouse.

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

#123

Post by MaxBarraclough »

prepend wrote: post #79
gpm wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OSI does not have a trademark on the term open source, they tried and failed to acquire one.

I think they need one. Comically, this is why trademarks exist to prevent people from confusing the market with similar and reused terms. I think we need a CreativeCommons-like trademark for open source software before it’s too late.

I don't think we really need that. The current solution works relatively well: anyone using open source in a sense other than that described by the OSI, is reliably met with a hailstorm of criticism on HackerNews for being disingenuous. That's as it should be. It's a term of art in the software world, and we don't insist on legal enforcement of every term of art.

I tend to capitalise the term, Open Source, to emphasise that I'm using it an a precise way. I do the same with Free Software. Not ironclad, but I figure it probably helps.

With all of that said, I don't think anyone should be permitted to deliberately mislead people when they're pushing a product. It's obviously right that false advertising is forbidden by law.

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

#124

Post by mrkeen »

Isognoviastoma wrote: post #71

In short, Amazon don't follow law of trademarks. Then, Elastic instead of enforcing their rights in court, changes license in hope that Amazon will follow law of copyright. How do they expect it will work? I don't get it.

> We’ve tried every avenue available including going through the courts

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

#125

Post by [deleted] »

Macha wrote: post #92
eznzt wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "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"?

Given that Elastic are describing that they've tried every option, I including legal ones and Amazon elasticsearch service is still named as such, it would seem it at least isn't as clear cut as elastic believes

[deleted]

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

#126

Post by drm237 »

wokwokwok wrote: post #85
nrmitchi wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. I mean, sure. Someone can poop on the lawn. There is a difference between that, and some business coming along with a dump truck full of shit that they then dump on the lawn, and I'm sure you understand that.

This is meaningless analogy; no one is pooping here. Whats happening is they’re selling the same product; legally they’re entitled to do so. They’re selling it in a deceptive (perhaps even legally dubious way), and thats not ok; but forget that, this has nothing really to do with being the good guys for open source and amazon being the bad guys, thats just the narrative that the elastic PR folk are putting out. What’…

"and thats not ok; but forget that"

Why do we need to forget the trademark infringement?

If Amazon is engaging in trademark infringement, lying about their connection\collaboration with the trademark holder, and including commercially licensed technology in an open source fork of a project, they are acting very poorly. Your argument of Amazon just being able to execute better falls flat if these facts are true and it means they're cheating, and that deserves some recognition.

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

#127

Post by jrochkind1 »

whitepaint wrote: post #90
josho wrote: post #45

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…

There are no better alternatives. And about the ElasticSearch, they should have just used a different license.

Would ElasticSearch have gotten as popular as it has if they had used a non-opensource license from the start?

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

#128

Post by danShumway »

eropple wrote: post #86
danShumway wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This isn't really the spirit of Open Source though. The point of Open Source is that reuse and modification isn't just technically allowed legally, it's encouraged . I fully support their right to change their licensing, and I understand they may not have thought through the implications of their license -- and I empathize with that. I also empathize with criticism that Amazon isn't doing a great job of supporting th…

Open source may be a moral system, but Karl Popper had a thing or two to say about actors who take advantage of the morality of a system for immoral ends. At some point, whether you or I appreciate it, the open source world was bound to have to reinvent a solution to that.

There is a solution to that already, it's called using source available licensing instead of Open Source.

But the point of Open Source is that reciprocity of code/money/value is not required. That's literally the scenario that many of us are trying to build.

It feels like the difference here is that you're looking at "someone builds a giant public hosting service off of our code" as an immoral end. But I'm saying that's not immoral, that is an acceptable result.

It's obviously not the result Elastic wanted, and I empathize with that, but... I don't know, maybe we need to educate people more about what Open Source actually means. Maybe we need to encourage more people to use source available licenses if there's a disconnect in how people understand the actual goals of the movement.

We believe that people have an intrinsic, moral right to share and reuse code. Not just good citizens who help build up the system and support us -- everybody.

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

#129

Post by marcosdumay »

eznzt wrote: post #47
Jonnax wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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"?

Is it exactly MySQL (but hosted by Eznzt) or is it something mostly like MySQL but different?

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

#130

Post by sithadmin »

eznzt wrote: post #47
Jonnax wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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"?

IANAL, but my understanding is that including the software package in the product/service name this would potentially open your company up to a trademark suit, because it potentiates customer confusion regarding the things that Elastic is complaining about w/r/t Amazon's offerings of Elasticsearch.

Personally, I find that thinking about this issue seems more intuitive when imagining tangible physical products. Imagine that Amazon decides to enter the Cookies as a Service market, and starts launching service offerings with names like 'Oreos by Amazon'. At a glance, would one not assume that this was some sort of collaborative effort between Nabisco and Amazon? I think the average consumer would. And the same probably applies in a situation involving a software product.

Post reply on HN