Elastic and Amazon reach agreement on trademark infringement lawsuit
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Re: Elastic and Amazon reach agreement on trademark infringement lawsuit
#2I was sort of curious, so I went to see what impact this had on the customer experience at AWS. Searching for 'elasticsearch' in the AWS console services dropdown now yields:
''' Amazon OpenSearch Service (successor to Amazon Elasticsearch Service)
Run and Scale OpenSearch and Elasticsearch Clusters (successor to Amazon Elasticsea... '''
This seems like a petty, small win from the Elasticsearch people. I understand AWS has a history of gobbling up OSS and productizing it, and that that's detrimental, but it's hard to see Elastic, Inc as anything but sore that they got their lunch eaten here. Maybe that's justified. But it comes off as incredibly petty.
(disclaimer: i used to work at aws, but not anywhere near the referenced offerings).
Re: Elastic and Amazon reach agreement on trademark infringement lawsuit
#3I was sort of curious, so I went to see what impact this had on the customer experience at AWS. Searching for 'elasticsearch' in the AWS console services dropdown now yields: ''' Amazon OpenSearch Service (successor to Amazon Elasticsearch Service) Run and Scale OpenSearch and Elasticsearch Clusters (successor to Amazon Elasticsea... ''' This seems like a petty, small win from the Elasticsearch people. I understand A…
Wow, it's pretty surprising to me that the agreement allowed AWS to refer to Elasticsearch at all when promoting their own managed search offering.
Re: Elastic and Amazon reach agreement on trademark infringement lawsuit
#4It would be nice if we can get some sort of standard license agreement for cases like this..
It’s such a shame that this happened
Re: Elastic and Amazon reach agreement on trademark infringement lawsuit
#5I was sort of curious, so I went to see what impact this had on the customer experience at AWS. Searching for 'elasticsearch' in the AWS console services dropdown now yields: ''' Amazon OpenSearch Service (successor to Amazon Elasticsearch Service) Run and Scale OpenSearch and Elasticsearch Clusters (successor to Amazon Elasticsea... ''' This seems like a petty, small win from the Elasticsearch people. I understand A…
It’s “detrimental” to companies who perhaps shouldn’t have chosen a license that allows AWS to do exactly what they did. Those companies can’t simultaneously claim to be competent and to have made that choice without knowing what they were doing.
IMO, they chased the benefits of being open source and then changed course when the costs to them exceeded the benefits (which is fine for code going forward), but trademark concerns aside, I can’t see AWS as the bad actor here.
Re: Elastic and Amazon reach agreement on trademark infringement lawsuit
#6I was sort of curious, so I went to see what impact this had on the customer experience at AWS. Searching for 'elasticsearch' in the AWS console services dropdown now yields: ''' Amazon OpenSearch Service (successor to Amazon Elasticsearch Service) Run and Scale OpenSearch and Elasticsearch Clusters (successor to Amazon Elasticsea... ''' This seems like a petty, small win from the Elasticsearch people. I understand A…
From what I understand about trademark law, unlike copyright, trademarks must be defended at risk of losing them. So it may seem petty, but might actually have some necessity behind it.
IANAL, and certainly not an expert on trademark law. Hopefully someone with more legal knowledge can provide some resources.
Even if it is just petty, it's petty against amazon, and I for one don't really feel the need to have sympathy for them.
Re: Elastic and Amazon reach agreement on trademark infringement lawsuit
#7It would be nice if we can get some sort of standard license agreement for cases like this.. It’s such a shame that this happened
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Re: Elastic and Amazon reach agreement on trademark infringement lawsuit
#8I was sort of curious, so I went to see what impact this had on the customer experience at AWS. Searching for 'elasticsearch' in the AWS console services dropdown now yields: ''' Amazon OpenSearch Service (successor to Amazon Elasticsearch Service) Run and Scale OpenSearch and Elasticsearch Clusters (successor to Amazon Elasticsea... ''' This seems like a petty, small win from the Elasticsearch people. I understand A…
Wow, it's pretty surprising to me that the agreement allowed AWS to refer to Elasticsearch at all when promoting their own managed search offering.
There's a constant struggle between allowing free speech versus restricting it via trademark laws. In general, they want to make sure companies can talk about and mention their competitors by name and not be silenced by trademark lawsuits, while still ensuring the trademark isn't being infringed to the point of confusion. "Amazon Elasticsearch Service" sounds an awful lot like they have permission to use the Elasticsearch brand, while simply referring to it in parentheses indicates it's a competing service to the actual elasticsearch.
Re: Elastic and Amazon reach agreement on trademark infringement lawsuit
#9I was sort of curious, so I went to see what impact this had on the customer experience at AWS. Searching for 'elasticsearch' in the AWS console services dropdown now yields: ''' Amazon OpenSearch Service (successor to Amazon Elasticsearch Service) Run and Scale OpenSearch and Elasticsearch Clusters (successor to Amazon Elasticsea... ''' This seems like a petty, small win from the Elasticsearch people. I understand A…
It’s “detrimental” to companies who perhaps shouldn’t have chosen a license that allows AWS to do exactly what they did. Those companies can’t simultaneously claim to be competent and to have made that choice without knowing what they were doing. IMO, they chased the benefits of being open source and then changed course when the costs to them exceeded the benefits (which is fine for code going forward), but trademark…
If anything AWS has increased its co-operation with F/OSS businesses of late and this clear shift in strategy was apparent in product / partnership announcements leading up to 2021 re:Invent. AWS, I believe, realise the F/OSS ecosystem mustn't be taken undue advantage of. I mean, AWS stands a good chance of getting caught in a vehement backlash (let alone sporadic bad PR) from the developer community, who ironically form the basis of an entire industry AWS sells into and operates in.
With Microsoft + GitHub intensifying their investments in F/OSS, AWS had to play ball. It is smart, not petty on anyone's part.
Judging from the tone of the article, I am glad Elastic is content in their current business relationship with AWS. Hopefully, the companies also find an agreement to have AWS' OpenSearch fork merged back in, as well.
disclaimer: ex-AWS, but zero insider information.
Re: Elastic and Amazon reach agreement on trademark infringement lawsuit
#10Looks like pretty good news. Have worked in AWS before. So AWS is very famous for making money using open source products without contributing upstream.
One very good example is Amazon redis. Amazon figured out that redis asynchronous replication didn't work at scale so instead of fixing issues upstream they chose to develop Amazon redis in house and monetized it.
https://aws.amazon.com/memorydb/
Enhanced version means patched made by AWS. https://aws.amazon.com/elasticache/redis-details/