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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

#591

Post by Jerry2 »

>We have seen that this trademark issue drives confusion with users thinking Amazon Elasticsearch Service is actually a service provided jointly with Elastic, with our blessing and collaboration. This is just not true. NOT OK.

I do not understand why they're not suing Amazon for a trademark violation. Imagine if they called themselves Elastic Amazon Search... Amazon would send them a cease and desist within a week.

Also, if you don't protect your trademarks, you will lose them! They're playing with fire here by not taking action. [1]

Anyway, send them a cease & desist for misusing your trademarks, Elastic!

[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/oliverherzfeld/2013/02/28/failu...

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

#592

Post by closeparen »

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…

If not AWS it could have been anyone. This is an inherent vulnerability in the open source business model: there's no particular reason that upstream developers would be the best at hosting or consulting on their own stuff. You can afford to give the client more attention/hardware for their money if you don't have to also pay developers.

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

#593

Post by michaelcampbell »

cmiles74 wrote: post #509
cortesoft wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

It wasn't a comparison, it was a statement of fact, which I think is true, no? ES was based on OS from Lucene, or it was not.

You're asserting a comparison where none was made.

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

#594

Post by mbreese »

jopsen wrote: post #540
mbreese wrote: post #440

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> if it is the most accurate way to refer to a good or service without misleading consumers as to its source. 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 offerin…

> clearly that people think they are getting a service supported by ES

Something like this is also asserted in the OP. However, I'm not so sure that is the case. I don't think it's clear at all.

Knowing that Elasticsearch is (was) open-source, I'd assume that I'm getting an AWS hosted installation of Elasticsearch... which is entirely accurate. If you can install the software on your own server, and AWS offers a managed version of it, I have no expectation that the original developers are involved at all.

Ever since the original release, it looks like AWS has been much better at avoiding any mention of Elastic.co. The original announcement Tweet was definitely misleading.

> 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.

I think this is the major problem, and you're right. Elasticsearch was the original trademark and is the accurate mark for the software. They only formed Elastic.co later, and this is where a lot of confusion originates. Elasticsearch != elastic.co

It might be better for AWS to just include a disclaimer like "AWS Elasticsearch Service includes the open source Elasticsearch software, but is not supported by the original developers." Something like that...

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

#595

Post by floatingatoll »

Conan_Kudo wrote: post #518
floatingatoll wrote: post #469

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The new license doesn't restrict others from operating Elasticsearch as a service. It restricts others from operating Elasticsearch as a service unless they release any source code patches, improvements, and/or functionality extensions they make to it. To me, that's exactly what you're saying you expected from liberal licenses, but it's delivered by a restrictive license, using the restrictions popularized by GPL lic…

> The new license doesn't restrict others from operating Elasticsearch as a service. It restricts others from operating Elasticsearch as a service unless they release any source code patches, improvements, and/or functionality extensions they make to it. If this was AGPL, I'd agree with you. IANAL, but SSPL is so broad that it could be construed to cover the Linux kernel, which is a no-no. :(

What real, non-theoretical, "would stand up in a courtroom" risk is there if the SSPL extends to cover the Linux kernel?

SSPL: you have to share your source code to the Linux kernel if you sell Elasticsearch-as-a-service"

GPL: you have to share your source code to the Linux kernel if you release binaries

SSPL+GPL: you have to share your source code to the Linux kernel if you sell Elasticsearch-as-a-service or if you release binaries

As long as the source is duly published under the merged SSPL+GPL conditions above, anyone trying to bring a GPL case against Elasticsearch-SSPL-on-Linux-GPL may discover that their judge refuses to enforce the GPL's hostility clause, because the SSPL strengthens the intent of the GPL without weakening it in any respect. We'll never know until someone gets to a judge, though, but my armchair speculation bet is that the "can't combine this license" clause won't hold up when the combination increases the total amount of Copyleft in play without decreasing it in any regard. I hope someone takes this to court and doesn't settle, or else we'll never find out :)

(I'm not your lawyer, this isn't legal advice, etc.)

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

#596

Post by cmiles74 »

tinyhouse wrote: post #525
cmiles74 wrote: post #512

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The only obligation that Easticsearch has to the Lucene project is to donate back improvements to Lucene itself. I believe the Elasticsearch project has done this in the past. No one is asking Amazon to share profits with Elastic. Many people do expect Amazon to honor trademarks of other companies. Many people expect Amazon not to package proprietary features as if they were free and open source. Lucene is a library…

I don't know anything about this story so cannot comment about them packaging proprietary features. But here's my thought about the trademarks claims from Elastic. The only info I have is the blog post they shared. Elasticsearch is a name of an open source project. Why is calling something "Amazon Elasticsearch Service" a trademark issue? It's not Amazon's fault they called their company after the name of an open sou…

The open source project trademarked the name of the project. Because it is trademarked, Amazon requires permission to use the name of the project.

This isn't unusual, many other open source projects trademarked the name of their project. Google has some guidance on why a project might want to do this.

https://google.github.io/opencasebook/trademarks/#unmanaged-...

Here is a list of open source projects whose name is trademarked by Canonical.

https://ubuntu.com/legal/trademarks

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

#597

Post by R0b0t1 »

sn_master wrote: post #314
R0b0t1 wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agree, the amount of people who license things as MIT is terrifying. There has been a couple of posts/rants on HN about this. A large company doesn't care about you, and licensing your code as MIT doesn't mean they're going to pay you. GPL actually gives you some teeth.

We're in the era of big platforms that can pick and choose the winners, and the winners have to play with those rules. see: GPLv3 ban on Tivoization. It makes anything v3 radioactive to any company seeking to make $$$.

The argument is that those people were never going to pay you money anyway so don't cater to them. All you can do is try to make it seem like it is cheaper to pay you for a license exception than it is to reimplement, but some places will reimplement anyway.

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

#598

Post by cmiles74 »

michaelcampbell wrote: post #593
cmiles74 wrote: post #509

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It wasn't a comparison, it was a statement of fact, which I think is true, no? ES was based on OS from Lucene, or it was not. You're asserting a comparison where none was made.

In my opinion, the phrase "based on" implies that a lot of the Elasticsearch functionality is actually Lucene functionality. I disagree that this is the case, I think there is a lot of functionality that Elasticsearch brings that is really othogonal to the Lucene project (sharding, multi-tenancy of indexes, clustering, managing nodes, etc.) Again, you my opinion, definitely enough for it's own project.

If that isn't what you meant then perhaps we are in agreement. :-)

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

#599

Post by matz1 »

Pet_Ant wrote: post #568
matz1 wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I'm not expecting you to pull up a tour-bus full of tourists, move into it and use it as housing, or a sex den for turning tricks But you should expecting that, you can't assume the listener will self-moderate.

Really? If someone comes over and you say "help yourself to anything in the fridge" you shouldn't expect that someone will take a snack and not clear out your fridge and load up there car with groceries for the week?

Yes I will expect that most people will not do that but some people will.

People are so diverse, I can't assume everybody behave the same, let alone behave the way I want.

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

#600

Post by notyourday »

lovehashbrowns wrote: post #572
notyourday wrote: post #416

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my experience it is that Elastic does not understand the market. About four years ago we have attempted to get their software . It felt like I was dealing with Cisco sales people circa 1998. They were clueless on how to do a multi hundred thousand dollar deal - think slow, inefficient, inflexible, unwilling to compromise on extra $500 add on that would have ended up being a rounding error.

That's how it is for a lot of companies, not just Elastic. We have to deal with jfrog, who has separate billing teams for SaaS and on-prem so for us to switch from on-prem to SaaS is a pain in the ass. If AWS ever offers artifacts storage with more artifact types, then obviously we're switching. And that's just 100% so we don't have to deal with jfrog's dumb ass contracts anymore, never mind pricing. ugh the pain tha…

And that's why AWS eats their lunch. Execs of Elastic ( and other companies ) should deal with their inept sales force rather than point fingers at AWS.
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