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Elastic and Amazon reach agreement on trademark infringement lawsuit

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Re: Elastic and Amazon reach agreement on trademark infringement lawsuit

#51

Post by Sebb767 »

skrtskrt wrote: post #46
Sebb767 wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Now, is there a way to solve that and have the benefits of FOSS? The answer is simple - no. Either your product is fully free and you accept that people can fork it, even Amazon, or you choose a restrictive license. You can't make "free" (as in libre) compatible with "but". I can totally see that you think this is unfair, but they did allow it and they were perfectly happy when being FOSS brought them market share.…

If everyone stomps their feet and says "there's no solution, otherwise it's not OSS!" then the end result is only going to be a lot less open-source software.

Well, it's just the free speech issue all over. Either you censor speech or you risk people saying things that you really don't like. This is exactly the same situation: Either you go FOSS, with all the benefits it entails, and risk getting forked by a major player or you go proprietary and risk not getting adopted at all by major players and open source enthusiasts.

Don't get me wrong, I feel with the Elastic team and I can understand why they're unhappy (even if I don't agree with their pettiness). I also don't particularly like the move Amazon did here. But that's why we want free software: If the current owner of the software does something you don't like, you can still use the software. That's the whole point.

And you're still free to pay Elastic to manage a cluster on AWS for you; Amazon might have forked the project, but it's still the customer that needs to switch to OpenSearch.

Re: Elastic and Amazon reach agreement on trademark infringement lawsuit

#52

Post by mullingitover »

growse wrote: post #45
mullingitover wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> someone else’s open source software This feels like an oxymoron: if it's open source licensed there is explicitly no 'owner.'

Perhaps they mean the copyright owner?

But which copyright owner? If the open source project has multiple contributors (not an unusual scenario in the slightest), it's not just a matter of one person's copyrights. Plus you get into the issue of the projects dependencies, and who owns those?

Re: Elastic and Amazon reach agreement on trademark infringement lawsuit

#53

Post by Dylan16807 »

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…

> It’s “detrimental” to companies who perhaps shouldn’t have chosen a license that allows AWS to do exactly what they did.

Yes, it is. Why the scare quotes?

Lots of things are legally allowed that would be very detrimental to me. Or you.

> Those companies can’t simultaneously claim to be competent and to have made that choice without knowing what they were doing.

I'm glad you can tell the future.

> 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.

You can at least see how the system has big problems, even if you don't want to blame Amazon for them, right?

Re: Elastic and Amazon reach agreement on trademark infringement lawsuit

#54

Post by dralley »

adventured wrote: post #22
rabuse wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ahh, the new Oracle.

No, not everything negative is the new Oracle. AWS has very little in common with how Oracle has operated historically. Oracle didn't build their company in the style of AWS Redis, that cloning maneuver. Oracle's database was a pioneer. Oracle didn't get where they are by cloning open source and claiming it as their own. Despite the numerous bad things that can be said about Oracle's culture, that's not one of the ke…

They killed and re-proprietarized OpenSolaris.

Re: Elastic and Amazon reach agreement on trademark infringement lawsuit

#55

Post by elesbao »

dhd415 wrote: post #34
CSDude wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Elastic is already a mature product, with little to improve. Even 8.0 release is focused on speed and footprint. Many companies still use 2.x happily. License implications are not worth it.

Having interacted with Elasticsearch a lot, I assure you there is a lot for them yet to improve. Frankly, I think Elasticsearch followed the MongoDB model of "make it easy for developers to adopt and then make it good." MDB did that by making it easy to throw "schema-less" documents into their database and then later working on "advanced" things like avoiding data loss [0]. Elasticsearch did something similar in that…

Indeed, there is a lot of room to improve. I managed a cluster that grew from 9 to 40 then to 60 EC2 Servers over 2 years, with all updates and support we could afford. It was a a nightmare to manage. The amount of cluster rebalancing, magic nodes that claim to be leader and then do not behave like it is amazing. I don't want ever to get back managing it again. Last thing I did (ES7 at the time) was to split the cluster in many smaller clusters, reimplement all counters on relational databases and use as little of ES as possible. As a former colleague used to say: Elasticsearch is MongoDB for people ashamed of using MongoDB. Hope AWS and Elastic tension helps them to do a better job there.

Re: Elastic and Amazon reach agreement on trademark infringement lawsuit

#56

Post by owenmarshall »

mullingitover wrote: post #52
growse wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps they mean the copyright owner?

But which copyright owner? If the open source project has multiple contributors (not an unusual scenario in the slightest), it's not just a matter of one person's copyrights. Plus you get into the issue of the projects dependencies, and who owns those ?

Most of the time this is solved by

* requiring code to be assigned by the author to a single person/company, consolidating ownership

* building your entire base on friendly licensed software (3BSD) and ducking any GPL

So it’s very easy to say, for example, that the Mozilla Foundation owns all the code that makes up Firefox - they won’t accept your pull request otherwise.

Re: Elastic and Amazon reach agreement on trademark infringement lawsuit

#57

Post by Dylan16807 »

Sebb767 wrote: post #40
skrtskrt wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Again, you’re leading with the definition-of-FOSS argument. Step back from FOSS for a second. I think most people would agree that there’s somewhat of a moral issue with just taking someone else’s open source software and just hosting it and making billions, with nothing for the creators, because you are a megacorp who is good at hosting. Now, is there a way to solve that and have the benefits of FOSS? Both Mongo and…

> Now, is there a way to solve that and have the benefits of FOSS? The answer is simple - no. Either your product is fully free and you accept that people can fork it, even Amazon, or you choose a restrictive license. You can't make "free" (as in libre) compatible with "but". I can totally see that you think this is unfair, but they did allow it and they were perfectly happy when being FOSS brought them market share.…

The question was not "would it be FOSS". The question is whether you can have the benefits of FOSS, or as much of them as possible.

Imagine just as an example, a license for personal software that is exactly the same as GPLv2 except billionaires can't use it. Functionally that has the same benefits as FOSS, even though it's not.

Re: Elastic and Amazon reach agreement on trademark infringement lawsuit

#58

Post by owenmarshall »

skrtskrt wrote: post #26
Salgat wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Again, you’re leading with the definition-of-FOSS argument. Step back from FOSS for a second. I think most people would agree that there’s somewhat of a moral issue with just taking someone else’s open source software and just hosting it and making billions, with nothing for the creators, because you are a megacorp who is good at hosting. Now, is there a way to solve that and have the benefits of FOSS? Both Mongo and…

you know that responding to comments tends to make a discussion flow, rather than stealing all our work for your own comment, incorporating them without credit? ;-)

Re: Elastic and Amazon reach agreement on trademark infringement lawsuit

#59

Post by sokoloff »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #53
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…

> It’s “detrimental” to companies who perhaps shouldn’t have chosen a license that allows AWS to do exactly what they did. Yes, it is. Why the scare quotes? Lots of things are legally allowed that would be very detrimental to me. Or you. > Those companies can’t simultaneously claim to be competent and to have made that choice without knowing what they were doing. I'm glad you can tell the future. > IMO, they chased t…

I can see several cases where open sourcing your core product will be very helpful to your company at one phase and harmful in another. Whether that’s a big problem in the system is a topic that people will differ on.

Re: Elastic and Amazon reach agreement on trademark infringement lawsuit

#60

Post by csdreamer7 »

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…

A side question: is there anything licensed AGPL that AWS uses? Either AWS releases the code or found a way around the license?
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