531–540 of 708 posts
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> Don't you need permission to advertise your product with Coca Cola™? Not if what you're selling is Coca Cola
Genuine question: why Amazon EKS and not Amazon Kubernetes then? I noticed every single managed Kubernetes doesn't call it Kubernetes.
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> if OSS is not a good fit for software entrepreneurship, then it puts a really severe cap on how advanced, polished, easy to use, or well supported OSS can be, because pushing really hard on software development and implementing tens of thousands of hours of fine-grained polish is far beyond what the vast majority of people can afford to (or are willing to) volunteer for free. Even if they start out as labors of lov…
Very few OSS projects get popular enough and are structurally amenable to that kind of group contribution scenario. Of those that are, in most cases it results in an unusable hodge podge of crap rather than a well crafted product.
Yes, very few open source projects ever move out of the fringes of relevance. That's always been true. The idea that there has been some radical change making OSS less relevant is just false; what has happened is that OSS has gotten enough mindshare that people who want to use business models that OSS has never been a good fit want to use OSS as an early marketing gimmick, and then pivot out of it without paying a price for not being OSS. And are upset that people who do care about OSS are calling them on their B.S. when they try it.
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 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…
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There is a link in the article to a separate post: https://www.elastic.co/blog/dear-search-guard-users-includin... . I think this is what it is referring to.
I read that article and it is very redolent of what SCO argued back in the day. If they had actual proof, they would take legal action against the author of that plugin.
The first sentence of that article:
> Back on September 4th, we filed a lawsuit against floragunn GmbH, the makers of Search Guard, a security plugin for Elasticsearch
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Did you read the blog post? They are mad about trademark violation and an allegation that their commercial code has been ripped off by Amazon through a third party. They have Elasticsearch trademarked and you can't use their name with your name on it. In their mind, it is a violation.
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.
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…
Your allowed to sell Apple Macs and advertise them as "Bob's Apple Mac store" without paying any royalties to Apple.
Similarly, Amazon can deploy the open-source ElasticSearch product, and deploy it, unaltered using the trademark.
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This is almost, but not quite, the "Tivoization" that prompted the creation of the GPL3. The requirement to give something back and/or avoid taking profit from the work of others is something the OSS world has a complicated relationship to. GPL is quite clear that there's a requirement to pass on source changes, if not explicitly to give them back, and many people were outraged by even this limited requirement and in…
> many people were outraged by even this limited requirement It isn’t a limited requirements. There is a very real legal risk that using GPL software in an enterprise code base means you have to open source of your entire code base. That is an unacceptable risk for almost any business so GPL software doesn’t get used.
GPL allows you to "use" but not "make derived works".
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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?
Trademark law is very different than copyright law. You are allowed to use trademarks in certain circumstances. You can’t imply a relationship that doesn’t exist, but AWS saying - this is a hosted version of Elasticsearch would probably be okay (but IANAL). Where they’d get into trouble is if they said they offered a hosted Elasticsearch, but under the hood it was something else. But, even then they could probably sa…
But if you're buying a service from AWS the source is not Elastic.
You might be able to say compatible with elastic search. But using the name in your own product name seems unlikely to hold.
I think this is shortsighted on Amazon's part, because it probably wouldn't cost all that much to make a joint offering.
I would be curious to know where those lawsuits went. Because it seems like something that should have been resolved, and for which you could get an injunction.
The problem is clearly that people think they are getting a service supported by ES, when they are getting a look-a-like copy service. Which is what trademarks are intended to resolve.
In hindsight, maybe it would have worked better for ES, had they called the open source product something else, like how centos isn't called RedHat.