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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

#421

Post by ryan_j_naughton »

Can someone help clarify something: the ES license change only affects future releases, right? The previous releases under the previous license are still valid, right?

If so, then my bet is Amazon will begin to treat ES like they do Aurora, namely, they will run their own fork of ES that from this point forward will be a separate code base and will evolve independently but will be "compatible" with anything that would otherwise expect the server to be a normal ES server (like how Aurora is compatible with MYSQL).

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

#422

Post by edoceo »

exhilaration wrote: post #311
edoceo wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Against the huge wallet of Amazon? Litigation isn't free. How much "justice" can Elastic afford?

A few people above have said that Elastic is worth $10-14 billion. This isn't a one-man OSS project we're talking about.

Valuation and available Cash are very different.

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

#423

Post by hello_moto »

dustinmoris wrote: post #293

I really like Elasticsearch. I run it myself hosted in a Kubernetes cluster using the Kubernetes Operator developed by Elastic, so I'm one of the people who uses Elasticsearch extensively without being a paying customer, but to be fair that is part of the reason why I opted for it. I think Elastic has become victim of its own success if I may say so. Running Elasticsearch self hosted is fairly easy, either on actual…

> If Elasticsearch wasn't such a great product then Amazon would also struggle more with providing a managed version in their cloud.

They do struggle a little bit on their AWS ES offerings if you go across certain threshold.

> I wonder if the monetisation strategy, which is basically Elastic Cloud, is the best option for Elastic.

Redis has RedisLab (cloud) and I can tell you AWS EC Redis does eat some of their customers through various reasons.

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

#425

Post by thefreeman »

BossingAround wrote: post #330
cactus2093 wrote: post #258

What’s the difference between what Amazon does with Elasticsearch vs what someone like Redhat does with the Linux kernel? Or what every hosting provider including AWS does with the Linux kernel, sell access to a service that is running that software. I get that Elasticsearch wants to run their own company, but I really have no sympathy for their arguments here. They released open source software and now are mad that…

> What’s the difference between what Amazon does with Elasticsearch vs what someone like Redhat does with the Linux kernel? Red Hat is a top 2-4 contributor to the Linux kernel though, depending on what source (and year) you take a look (e.g. [1]). The big difference is that Amazon doesn't contribute back. The comparison seems misguided at best. [1] https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Linux-Gi...

The real problem that Elastic doesn't like is that amazon reimplements features as part of their core offering that ES tries to charge for. I'm sure they would have no problem contributing back but Elastic doesn't want these features to become part of the core offering.

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

#426

Post by [deleted] »

ardy42 wrote: post #307
notatoad wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> leveraging your market dominance in one area to compete in another is illegal Leveraging your monopoly to compete in another area is illegal. Leveraging a strong position isn’t and Amazon is a long ways from a monopoly.

> Leveraging your monopoly to compete in another area is illegal. Leveraging a strong position isn’t and Amazon is a long ways from a monopoly. That really depends on interpretation, which has shifted over time and continues to shift. IIRC, recent interpretations of some types of anti-competitive behavior have been rather literal and required something very close to a literal monopoly, which has had the effect of neu…

[deleted]

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

#427

Post by M2Ys4U »

notatoad wrote: post #282
ardy42 wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You're kind of right about this, but it's the issue that AWS just has a massive head-start with any client that already uses AWS. They don't really out-compete, they just use their existing vendor lock-in to gain an advantage. And really, by using your dominance in one "market" to gain an advantage elsewhere ends up feeling like a bit of a grey area. I'm not sure if it's actually a gray area, since I'm pretty sure…

> leveraging your market dominance in one area to compete in another is illegal Leveraging your monopoly to compete in another area is illegal. Leveraging a strong position isn’t and Amazon is a long ways from a monopoly.

That depends on jurisdiction.

In the EU, it is "dominant market position" (and explicitly so) that's the threshold for the Commission to take competition action, for instance.

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

#428

Post by tareqak »

I remember there being a few posts about companies/foundations relicensing their code in about the last three months. Their approach was relicense to be AGPLv3 for their OSS license and allowing interested parties to pay for a commercial license. However, contributors had to license their code as both AGPLv3 and BSD if I remember correctly.

Does anyone using the above approach have any comments about how well this approach is working for them?

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

#429

Post by M2Ys4U »

sammax wrote: post #396
rjmunro wrote: post #382

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please don't confuse trademarks and Copyrights - they are entirely separate things. Using a trademark is not infringing Copyright. It may or may not be infringing the trademark, but that's a whole different thing. In general, anyone can use your trademark as long as they are using it about you or your product. I can say "I like Coca Cola, it tastes great" or even "Coca Cola is disgusting" but if I put Coca Cola on th…

Don't you need permission to advertise your product with Coca Cola™? Or in this case, would Amazon not need Elastic's permission to say "we use Elastic" to advertise AWS?

> Don't you need permission to advertise your product with Coca Cola™?

Not if what you're selling is Coca Cola

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

#430

Post by [deleted] »

ardy42 wrote: post #307
notatoad wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> leveraging your market dominance in one area to compete in another is illegal Leveraging your monopoly to compete in another area is illegal. Leveraging a strong position isn’t and Amazon is a long ways from a monopoly.

> Leveraging your monopoly to compete in another area is illegal. Leveraging a strong position isn’t and Amazon is a long ways from a monopoly. That really depends on interpretation, which has shifted over time and continues to shift. IIRC, recent interpretations of some types of anti-competitive behavior have been rather literal and required something very close to a literal monopoly, which has had the effect of neu…

[deleted]
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