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Elastic and Amazon reach agreement on trademark infringement lawsuit

elastic.co

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Re: Elastic and Amazon reach agreement on trademark infringement lawsuit

#11

Post by skrtskrt »

sokoloff wrote: post #5
WaxProlix wrote: post #2

I 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…

This comment is in every thread about this, but there has to be a solution that satisfies FOSS purists as well as casual users without allowing a massive, evil megacorp to just stomp on every company built around open-source solutions.

Re: Elastic and Amazon reach agreement on trademark infringement lawsuit

#12

Post by sdesol »

Full disclosure: This is my tool that I'm using to generate the insights.

When OpenSearch was announced, I shared some insights into how both Elasticsearch and OpenSearch were evolving, and I'll share some more up to date insights here.

Looking at recent pull request activity, OpenSearch had 52 contributors

https://oss.gitsense.com/insights/github?q=pull-age%3A%3C%3D...

while Elasticsearch had 181

https://oss.gitsense.com/insights/github?q=pull-age%3A%3C%3D...

The metric that I'm most interested in, is knowing how many people committed within the last 14 days compared to those that committed more than 14 days ago. For Elasticsearch, they had 87 contributors which accounts for 68% of all contributors. OpenSearch had 20, which accounts for 67%. With these numbers, I can ball park how many people are working on Elasticsearch and OpenSearch full time and I would say Elasticsearch at the present moment has probably 5 times more people working on it fulltime vs OpenSearch.

An important thing to note is, Amazon has other projects that are related to OpenSearch so these numbers don't necessary give the full picture, but it is pretty obvious that Elasticsearch is evolving at a much faster pace and time will tell if they (OpenSearch) can keep up.

Re: Elastic and Amazon reach agreement on trademark infringement lawsuit

#13

Post by rabuse »

uji wrote: post #10

Looks 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 mea…

Ahh, the new Oracle.

Re: Elastic and Amazon reach agreement on trademark infringement lawsuit

#14

Post by wumpus »

chrsig wrote: post #6
WaxProlix wrote: post #2

I 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 sympath…

Most people don't really get what trademark defense is -- having Amazon label the trademark in some places as "Elasticsearch is a trademark of " is enough to count. Even linking the elasticsearch software repo or elastic.co in conjunction with the trademark name is enough.

Source: I have a best-selling book author friend who has been defending her trademark on a somewhat popular pop-culture term this way for a few decades.

Re: Elastic and Amazon reach agreement on trademark infringement lawsuit

#15

Post by WaxProlix »

chrsig wrote: post #6
WaxProlix wrote: post #2

I 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 sympath…

That makes sense. I do sort of wish there were something to take away from this though that might lead to better outcomes for future endeavours, so that people could learn from Elastic's blunder, but if there's anything I don't see it.

Re: Elastic and Amazon reach agreement on trademark infringement lawsuit

#16

Post by Salgat »

skrtskrt wrote: post #11
sokoloff wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

This comment is in every thread about this, but there has to be a solution that satisfies FOSS purists as well as casual users without allowing a massive, evil megacorp to just stomp on every company built around open-source solutions.

How is AWS stomping all over it? Being able to fork for your own needs is a good thing. You don't make something open source and accept the world's free contributions without acknowledging that.

Re: Elastic and Amazon reach agreement on trademark infringement lawsuit

#18

Post by sdesol »

baobabKoodaa wrote: post #17

This announcement is confusing, because it makes no mention of OpenSearch. The announcement implies that OpenSearch should no longer be available on AWS, but (of course) it is.

It was announced by elastic and I'm not sure it is in their best interest to advertise their competitor.

Re: Elastic and Amazon reach agreement on trademark infringement lawsuit

#19

Post by TSiege »

sdesol wrote: post #12

Full disclosure: This is my tool that I'm using to generate the insights. When OpenSearch was announced, I shared some insights into how both Elasticsearch and OpenSearch were evolving, and I'll share some more up to date insights here. Looking at recent pull request activity, OpenSearch had 52 contributors https://oss.gitsense.com/insights/github?q=pull-age%3A%3C%3D... while Elasticsearch had 181 https://oss.gitsens…

I'll be curious to see what happens as well. I ended up going with Opensearch since I use AWS. I figured I'm already locked in to that environment anyways, so why not

Re: Elastic and Amazon reach agreement on trademark infringement lawsuit

#20

Post by ignoramous »

rabuse wrote: post #13
uji wrote: post #10

Looks 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 mea…

Ahh, the new Oracle.

At this point in AWS' life, enterprise sales is king. Not surprising that there's shades of Oracle / Microsoft in them. May be, Google hired Oracle #2, Thomas Kurian, to head GCP for similar reasons. Like it or not, Oracle-sized shadow looms large over BigCloud.
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