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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

#501

Post by ivlivs »

ignoramous wrote: post #356
c0l0 wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The notion of Open Distro for ES being "a fork" is, in my opinion and as of last I checked, overblown. Yes, they bundle a bunch of freely licensed stuff to make up for features that Elastic themselves have paywalled off (or sealed behind their free-to-use, but non-libre, custom license where they don't show/include sources either), but they rely on and effectively install the (hitherto) Apache-licensed upstream relea…

You should consider opening an issue on their github [0]? AWS, from what I know, takes security seriously, and given they themselves use OpenDistro internally, this should become a top priority for them. [0] https://github.com/opendistro-for-elasticsearch/opendistro-b...

Here's the issue for that. Fixed in July.

https://github.com/opendistro-for-elasticsearch/opendistro-b...

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

#503

Post by chippiewill »

nrmitchi wrote: post #257
CaptArmchair wrote: post #236

I think I have grown a rather hard stance on this over the years: putting an open source license on a product isn't a business model. It's, by and large, a part of a larger business model. A license is a choice. It means you choose to not gain revenue by directly licensing the IP. Instead, you choose to put the code out there without any further legal obligations on your part as well as those who use that code. It al…

> Amazon simply out-competes ElasticSearch with their own product when it comes to consultancy, services 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…

I think there's a subtlety in the way Amazon as a company markets what they do and leverages the brand that's important here.

Take for instance Amazon RDS which is a family of managed relational database services. I don't think "Amazon RDS for MySQL" is an unfair use of the "MySQL" trademark, even if Amazon haven't asked Oracle's permission. The reason here is that it's much clearer in the way RDS is branded that it's not endorsed by the database engines it supports, it uses their trademarks to describe the engines they integrate with which seems reasonable in my view. Amazon RDS is still its own independent brand.

"Amazon Elasticsearch Service" crosses the mark in my opinion because it blurs the line between the two brands and in many ways implies that Amazon actually made Elasticsearch themselves.

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

#504

Post by hello_moto »

srockets wrote: post #486
hello_moto wrote: post #420

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but I just found ScyllaDB and RedisLabs there, so it must be working for some. No, it doesn't work for RedisLabs. Amazon offers managed Redis called AWS EC Redis and recently someone I knew decided to move their entire Redis (multiple) clusters from RedisLabs to AWS EC. RedisLabs lost hundred of thousand dollars.

I would like to think there are other definitions for a successful business than it being a single vendor.

RedisLabs is probably the vendor that foot the bill for Redis software development end-to-end.

While I understand that some people viewed a successful OSS project is akin to Wordpress: lots of hosting providers, rich ecosystems, _and_ Wordpress main company is still making good money out of it; this is not apple to apple comparison (can't compare Redis and Wordpress).

Redis belongs to the group of MongoDB, ElasticSearch, etc.

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

#505

Post by quotemstr »

> We have differentiated with proprietary features, and now we see these feature designs serving as "inspiration" for Amazon

The rest of Amazon's behavior aside, there's nothing wrong with cloning a feature. Cloning features is in fact an essential part of competition.

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

#506

Post by FemmeAndroid »

dd_roger wrote: post #468
wazoox wrote: post #363

Amazon illegally uses the ElasticSearch trademark. Amazon illegally uses and distributes proprietary Elastic's code. Why do people in the thread keeps repeating that it's OK while it's very obviously abuse by a too-powerful company? More generally I can't understand (and can't stand either) why people keep defending monopolists on HN. Monopolies are bad, morally, economically, in all sort of ways. They fuel abuse and…

Neither of these issues have anything to do with the license. Either Elastic's code used by Amazon is indeed stolen proprietary code and no licensing change is needed to obtain reparation, or Amazon is making lawful use of FOSS source code and the question boils down to "if I publish code under a FOSS license, can anybody use it?", to which the answer is obviously yes. And if you'd prefer it to be "no" then don't pub…

The trademark has to do with licensing insofar as if a major reseller of your OSS licensed product will infringe on your trademark, the easiest solution might be to modify the license. Especially when the alternative is lengthy trademark disputes with a huge company with a lot of lawyers.

At the end of the day offering an OSS license becomes less viable when it seems like major players aren’t playing fairly.

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

#507

Post by [deleted] »

hvis wrote: post #339
cactus2093 wrote: post #308

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes but how does changing their license affect a trademark? If they are legally in the right and this is a violation of their trademark they should win their lawsuit about it regardless. Also my initial question was not purely rhetorical, I would assume "Linux" is also trademarked so I'm wondering what is the difference there and why Redhat selling RHEL has not been the same problem.

Because Linus has no problems with Red Hat? And because Red Hat employs a lot of the key contributors to the Linux kernel? Also: https://www.infoworld.com/article/2671387/linus-gets-tough-o...

[deleted]

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

#508

Post by chippiewill »

spzb wrote: post #398
ethbr0 wrote: post #379

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I read their argument as 'suing Amazon in the courts for trademark infringement is an insufficiently expedient remedy.' It does OSS no good if Elastic prevails on merits the day after they go out of business from lost revenue.

And what remedy do they have to a copyright license infringement? The same glacial pace legal system.

The damages and ramifications for violating software copyright are much clearer than the nuanced world of trademark infringement.

The change in ElasticSearch license here is well publicised. If AWS were to continue to incorporate new changes to ElasticSearch it would be obvious they had deliberately violated the terms of the license and it's much easier to pursue a legal case.

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

#509

Post by cmiles74 »

cortesoft wrote: post #193
stavros wrote: post #166

Apart from the general consternation about an OSS license becoming non-OSS, can we also talk about the problem that companies are formed, invest a whole lot of resources into creating a product, open-source it, and then have Amazon eat into their profits by just installing and maintaining that product as a service? No matter how you slice it, I think Amazon is bad for us end-users, and Elastic is good. Elastic could…

> Elastic could have released ES as closed source, but they didn't, and the OSS ecosystem is better for it. Except elasticsearch was created before the company Elastic even existed. They couldn’t have released it as closed source because they weren’t there to release it at all. It was written by one guy and it was based on previous open source code in Lucene. I am ok with them making money off their project, but it i…

Elasticsearch offers _a lot_ above and beyond what you get out-of-the-box with Lucene. For sure, the Lucene library is used by Elasticsearch but this comparison is way off base.

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

#510

Post by aprdm »

lovelearning wrote: post #415
aprdm wrote: post #373

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The apache license, https://github.com/elastic/elasticsearch/blob/master/LICENSE... If you don't use any of the x-pack features (which used to be paid) you're all good.

Not quite. Elastic is removing Apache licensing altogether for ES and Kibana from 7.11 and switching them to SSPL (or alternately the Elastic license based on user's choice) [1]. [1] : https://www.elastic.co/blog/licensing-change

Oh okay, missed it, thanks!
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