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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

#71

Post by Dylan16807 »

sokoloff wrote: post #59
Dylan16807 wrote: post #53

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. 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.

I get it, you see this as complaining about how things shifted when this is a tradeoff they embraced from the start.

But there are situations where it's not that things changed, with companies that would love to be open source but it would hurt them at all phases.

If you have to be super proprietary to make any money off software, that's bad for everyone.

When a piece of code is responsible for enormous amounts of money and none of that goes to the author, that's a bad way to get more code and a bad way to support valuable authors.

Re: Elastic and Amazon reach agreement on trademark infringement lawsuit

#72

Post by skrtskrt »

owenmarshall wrote: post #48
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…

You’ve got it precisely backwards. The license placed on a software encodes what you wish to allow other people to do with it. If you have a moral qualm with bigcorps using your work for free, you don’t license in such a way that they can. Make your own license, or slap AGPL3 on it - either way, no bigcorp touches it. But you cannot be mad when you say “I release this code under these terms” and AWS takes you up on y…

I think we've seen that the corps with the lawyering and engineering know-how will definitely touch AGPLv3

Re: Elastic and Amazon reach agreement on trademark infringement lawsuit

#73

Post by rubiquity »

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…

Disclaimer: ex-AWS as well, worked very closely with MemoryDB, but not paid to shill!

You're entitled to your opinion but your line of reasoning for how MemoryDB for Redis came to exist or the reasoning about why it isn't in upstream Redis is not factual. MemoryDB's architecture uses Amazon's home grown log replication services as pointed out by Werner Vogel in his blog post about MemoryDB[0]. This architecture is fundamentally incompatible with upstream Redis. The real reason why MemoryDB for Redis exists is far less juicy: MemoryDB came about by meeting customers where they were. Customer's love Redis, especially for its non-caching features, but replication is a headache with all the existing solutions today.

Also as far as I know one of the lead committers to Redis is from AWS.

0 - https://www.allthingsdistributed.com/2021/11/amazon-memorydb...

Re: Elastic and Amazon reach agreement on trademark infringement lawsuit

#74

Post by pjgalbraith »

deepsun wrote: post #25
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…

Sometimes fixing upstream is hard / not possible, when maintainers don't want to accept others' proposals/vision, or are cautious to change architecture with breaking changes.

I don't know much about this particular case. However generally speaking that is not true. They would just need to make the fork public. Whether the maintainer accepted the changes upstream is irrelevant.

Re: Elastic and Amazon reach agreement on trademark infringement lawsuit

#75

Post by rmccue »

Hopefully this will let each of them compete on their own merits.

I’ve been tossing up moving our workloads to Elastic Cloud anyway, because AWS ES Service is a source of constant headaches for us. Feels like at least once a week a server ends up in a state where we can’t fix it, and AWS engineers have to manually fix their internal state.

Their standard response is “add more nodes”; well, we did that, and it is costing us an arm and a leg, and it didn’t fix the problems. (Plus, now we have new problems where networking blips appear to be causing quorum problems and sending the cluster into a death spiral.)

Purely off the customer experience, it feels like Elastic Cloud has to be better; the whole licensing debacle has definitely turned me off Elastic though.

Re: Elastic and Amazon reach agreement on trademark infringement lawsuit

#76

Post by theamk »

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…

So.. Redis had a choice of licenses: BSD (improvements do not need to be contrbuted back) or GPL (improvements do need to be contributed back).

For whatever reason they chose BSD. And now Amazon made some improvements and is not contributing back.

Not sure why anyone is surprised.

Re: Elastic and Amazon reach agreement on trademark infringement lawsuit

#77

Post by nextaccountic »

LoveGracePeace wrote: post #30
ignoramous wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It surprises me when people lump Oracle (or AWS for that matter) in with the likes of Microsoft.

The process to make MS-OOXML an ISO standard was a dirty one https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standardization_of_Office_Open... and 2008 wasn't that long ago

Re: Elastic and Amazon reach agreement on trademark infringement lawsuit

#78

Post by stonemetal12 »

growse wrote: post #39
zakki wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except AWS is not forking open source for their own use. They sell it and get a lot of profit from it.

> Except AWS is not forking open source for their own use. They sell it and get a lot of profit from it. They sell a hosted service that uses the software. They're not selling the software. Pretty difficult to see how a company building a SaaS business around some software is not "for their own use".

You also never hear anyone complain about the thousands of hosting providers that build their business around the LAMP stack. I wonder if it is because Amazon is so big, or just the lack of competition.

Re: Elastic and Amazon reach agreement on trademark infringement lawsuit

#79

Post by owenmarshall »

skrtskrt wrote: post #72
owenmarshall wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You’ve got it precisely backwards. The license placed on a software encodes what you wish to allow other people to do with it. If you have a moral qualm with bigcorps using your work for free, you don’t license in such a way that they can. Make your own license, or slap AGPL3 on it - either way, no bigcorp touches it. But you cannot be mad when you say “I release this code under these terms” and AWS takes you up on y…

I think we've seen that the corps with the lawyering and engineering know-how will definitely touch AGPLv3

Name one.

Google won’t: https://opensource.google/documentation/reference/using/agpl...

Unless things have changed recently I know Amazon won’t, and I’m fairly sure Facebook still won’t.

For most corporations it’s simply not worth the risk

Re: Elastic and Amazon reach agreement on trademark infringement lawsuit

#80

Post by skrtskrt »

shawnz wrote: post #47
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…

Don't you think there's a moral issue expecting free contributions to something which only you are allowed to monetize? And how can you satisfy users to the greatest extent while also preventing them from using the provider that is best able to meet their needs? EDIT: regarding your inline response, > Nowhere in OSS licenses does it include the expectations of free contributions The expectation is not encoded in the…

There are plenty of reasons for choosing an OSS license - people can easily audit the code, people can self host for their own purposes, etc.

There is plenty of code that is only open-sourced after it has been fully created by a single organization/entity - no free contributions needed!

If we're talking about expectations not encoded in the license it's very clear that developers would just like to be able to release software with all those OSS benefits, but also to have a way to be compensated when AWS takes it, charges people to have it run it on an AWS server, and makes a ton of money.

I'm not denying AWS is adding value, but it sure is odd that they're the only ones making a dime there.

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