Open source, again … for now.
Elasticsearch is open source, again
31–40 of 473 posts
Re: Elasticsearch is open source, again
#32Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't understand why they didn't treat Amazon's previous offering as a trademark infringement.
If I sell my Toyota car on the side of the road I can call it a Toyota. If I sell you ElasticSearch(tm) Service which is the actual ES code base, what’s the infringement?
> If I sell you ElasticSearch(tm) Service which is the actual ES code base, what’s the infringement?
A reasonable consumer or customer might be confused into thinking a service named ElasticSearch(tm) Service is being provided by the company behind ElasticSearch. This confusion is exactly what trademarks rather than copyrights are meant to prevent.
The trademark law doctrine of nominative fair use allows you to describe your product as a hosted version of the ElasticSearch codebase, which provides the substance of the right you were describing, and it's also why you can describe the Toyota car you're selling as a Toyota, both without needing permission from a rights holder.
In the car case, you can also reference the product by name as a Toyota product because it is the same product Toyota sold, just being resold by you. But in the hosted service case, you're not reselling the same service as Elastic does; you're offering your own independent version of the service, backed by their technology. To prevent unwarranted damage to Elastic's reputation from any weaknesses in your service's reliability, customer support, or other factors, trademark law doesn't let you call your service ElasticSearch Service without their permission.
This works similarly for lots of software products and services, even other free and open source software projects. Debian has a trademark policy and exercises oversight of modified / derived / integrated versions shipped by the major public cloud providers to make sure that it's consistent enough with Debian's software freedom values, expected functionality, and quality standards to be called Debian, using trademark rights as the way they have that leverage.
At the same time, the cloud providers do not need trademark permission from Debian to redistribute unmodified official Debian images under the name Debian, or to derive from them without using Debian in the product name. (As with the ElasticSearch example, they can still use the word Debian in a fair and accurate way when describing the nature of any derived product they make without trademark permission.)
Re: Elasticsearch is open source, again
#33Nice, maybe they can hire some humans to write more explanatory website text, documentation, pricing information—better yet, anything on their website.
Elastic.co is the #1 example we use with our clients when we want to show how 'vague websites make you lose clients.' We show them the website and ask, 'What do you think of this company?' and 'What do you think they are providing as a service?' Not a single client, including tech-savvy ones, has been able to answer.
Elastic.co is probably one of the worst websites that somehow gained popularity despite its crappy pricing model and support. Their documentation assumes you already know everything about their weirdly vague services and have in-depth knowledge of server infrastructures.
To anyone who works for them: If you're reading this, know that your website is so terrible that it became our first example of a crappy company.
Re: Elasticsearch is open source, again
#34Earlier quoted context omitted.
If I sell my Toyota car on the side of the road I can call it a Toyota. If I sell you ElasticSearch(tm) Service which is the actual ES code base, what’s the infringement?
The service is more than the code base: it's who is offering it, who supports it. Besides, I'd be shocked if that analogy is how the law works. Perhaps if you'd bought an individual license then sure, you could resell it with the brand name, just like the car. But wholesale is a completely different situation.
It depends on the legal jurisdiction but in the US you're allowed to use a competitor's brand name/trademark specifically to inform your customers. E.g. "acetaminophen, the stuff that's in Tylenol". You can also use the competitor's brand colors.
Re: Elasticsearch is open source, again
#35Stock is down almost 25% afterhours (not sure if due to this or their earnings call)
Re: Elasticsearch is open source, again
#36Earlier quoted context omitted.
If I sell my Toyota car on the side of the road I can call it a Toyota. If I sell you ElasticSearch(tm) Service which is the actual ES code base, what’s the infringement?
The service is more than the code base: it's who is offering it, who supports it. Besides, I'd be shocked if that analogy is how the law works. Perhaps if you'd bought an individual license then sure, you could resell it with the brand name, just like the car. But wholesale is a completely different situation.
> Besides, I'd be shocked if that analogy is how the law works.
There's not really much actual law at work here, it's all civil matters.
Re: Elasticsearch is open source, again
#37> The good news is that while it was painful, it worked. 3 years later, Amazon is fully invested in their fork, the market confusion has been (mostly) resolved, and our partnership with AWS is stronger than ever. We were even named AWS partner of the year. I don't entirely understand this bit.
It was so that AWS would create their own name for their fork: > we changed the license, knowing it would result in a fork of Elasticsearch with a different name and a different trajectory. It’s a long story. I think the name of the fork is now OpenSearch.
Am I the only one not buying this reasoning? Seems like there's more than is being said, otherwise they would have said this by now. I'd reckon that ELv2 had friction that couldn't be easily overcome without OSS or at the very least DOSP [0]. I personally experienced said friction with ELv2, so makes me curious.
Re: Elasticsearch is open source, again
#38Okay, cool. No notes, that's neat. Are there any SMEs that have worked with both OpenSearch (the fork) and ElasticSearch? Are there significant differences? I know the AWS fork had the big difference back then of having RBAC built into their Kibana portion.
OpenSearch has terrible docs.
Re: Elasticsearch is open source, again
#39Earlier quoted context omitted.
It was so that AWS would create their own name for their fork: > we changed the license, knowing it would result in a fork of Elasticsearch with a different name and a different trajectory. It’s a long story. I think the name of the fork is now OpenSearch.
what is preventing AWS from dropping OpenSearch and going back to just selling Elastic ?
It's a very different open source license than their previous one.
AGPL vs Apache 2.0
Re: Elasticsearch is open source, again
#40Too late, the community all moved over to OpenSearch. I'll never forgive Elastic for locking basic security features behind their paid licence. Over the years probably millions of people had their data compromised due to that (due to people inadvertently leaving instances on the public internet - having auth enabled by default would have helped a lot)
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