These things seem like Amazon went beyond just selling their hosted version of Elasticstack:
"When the service launched, imagine our surprise when the Amazon CTO tweeted that the service was released in collaboration with us. It was not. And over the years, we have heard repeatedly that this confusion persists. NOT OK."
"So imagine our surprise when Amazon launched their service in 2015 based on Elasticsearch and called it Amazon Elasticsearch Service. We consider this to be a pretty obvious trademark violation. NOT OK."
"When Amazon announced their Open Distro for Elasticsearch fork, they used code that we believe was copied by a third party from our commercial code and provided it as part of the Open Distro project. We believe this further divided our community and drove additional confusion. "
> "When the service launched, imagine our surprise when the Amazon CTO tweeted that the service was released in collaboration with us. It was not. And over the years, we have heard repeatedly that this confusion persists. NOT OK."
This just means their CTO was sloppy, Amazon legal department would have never allowed that tweet.
> "So imagine our surprise when Amazon launched their service in 2015 based on Elasticsearch and called it Amazon Elasticsearch Service. We consider this to be a pretty obvious trademark violation. NOT OK."
This is a trademark violation indeed though IANAL, it doesn't require a change to the license to attack them for that. Definitely an abuse of power by Amazon though, completely not ok as they don't care about paying a fine for that, they have all the money in the world. But again, not related to the license thing.
> "When Amazon announced their Open Distro for Elasticsearch fork, they used code that we believe was copied by a third party from our commercial code and provided it as part of the Open Distro project. We believe this further divided our community and drove additional confusion. "
Elastic was known to mix proprietary and open source code and it got to a point where few people knew what was open source and what was not. Many people were not happy with this situation and elastic.co was abusing the situation to charge paid licenses as people were scared of using proprietary code without knowing. The work amazon did to remove all proprietary code from they fork was actually welcomed by the community though I'm not surprised they missed some as it was really hard to tell.
It sounds like their whole issue was about confusion in the marketplace, though, and when someone does an oopsie that results in that kind of confusion, it may not be enough to take care of it quietly, on the side. So it seems now Elastic is making more noise, in an effort to clarify things more publicly.
>This just means their CTO was sloppy, Amazon legal department would have never allowed that tweet.
Surely the legal department would have issued some sort of retraction. Can you find it?
>Definitely an abuse of power by Amazon
Yeah, that's what we're saying.
>people were scared of using proprietary code without knowing...I'm not surprised they missed some as it was really hard to tell.
Amazon is a trillion dollar company that has every capability of doing their due diligence. Sloppy communication, abuse of trademarks and stealing proprietary code are all inexcusable behaviors by a company with the size and power that Amazon has.
You're describing the problem as if it were the excuse. Amazon abused their power, stole proprietary code, abused a trademark, and violated the culture of the open source community whose code they were leveraging for profit. There's no excuse for it, even if it was somehow legal - and I don't suspect it was. I suspect that Amazon knows it's not legal - they just figure they can get away with it.
> This just means their CTO was sloppy, Amazon legal department would have never allowed that tweet.
Sure, but we are not talking about "the intern tweeted something incorrect, gather your pitchforks until they delete it".
We are talking about a prolonged time span where AWS completely abused their massive size and market tower to basically do the legal and PR equivalent of laughing in the face of another company they were using and abusing. Details aside, that is a pretty grim view for the world of software, no?
> "So imagine our surprise when Amazon launched their service in 2015 based on Elasticsearch and called it Amazon Elasticsearch Service. We consider this to be a pretty obvious trademark violation. NOT OK."
I don't understand. If I have an ISP and I offer mysql servers, can't I call that offering "Eznzt MySQL Service"?
Given that Elastic are describing that they've tried every option, I including legal ones and Amazon elasticsearch service is still named as such, it would seem it at least isn't as clear cut as elastic believes
Last time I checked, no, you couldn't.
You could instead call the offering "Eznzt Service for MySQL".
A long time ago I had an open source project to manage mysql replication topologies, and I called it mysql-ha. At some point, they reached out to me about the trademark infringement.
They were nice about it, I did not get a legal notice or anything, just a contact from a MySQL employee pointing me to their policy (as in my response to your example: I could have called it ha-for-mysql), and requesting that I changed the name to make it compliant. I ended up with a full rename (called it highbase) and they were kind enough to give me a one year free subscription to MySQL Enterprise as a token of appreciation for my change.
In way that I think is interesting regarding the AWS and Elastic situation, what MySQL's trademark policy intended was to avoid the situation in which a third party could be confused by a product or project name (mysql-ha in my case) as to believe that MySQL, the company, was behind the offering. So any use of the trademark that made it clear they were not involved (as in the "X for MySQL" vs. "MySQL X") was ok.
I’m confused too. IANAL but this seems like it’s a clear use of trademark.
Amazon sells Hershey bars through its site. I don’t think it needs to get permission to say “here’s the subscribe and save service to buy Hershey bars.”
I think the confusion is whether ElasticCo is endorsing or part of the service offering. So it should be clear that the offering isn’t by ElasticCo.
Back to the chocolate example, as long as Amazon doesn’t make it seem like Hershey is endorsing their site or offering the product they should be clear. I’ve seen this tucked into the fine print on stuff where it says that just because they are selling Hershey it has nothing to do with Hershey the company.
It seems odd that the company wouldn’t want it to be called AWS ElasticSearch as that’s what it is. ElasticSearch software sold as a service by AWS. Calling it something else is more confusing.
It's a bit more muddled then that since AWS isn't using the true ElasticSearch bits but rather an OpenDistro fork of it that they created themselves. So is it still ElasticSearch? Mostly, but it's not exactly the same thing either. But of course AWS would want to leverage the name recognition of ElasticSearch...
Opendistro is not a fork, it’s a collection of plugins that work with the open source elasticsearch distribution, basically it replaces what used to be called x-pack (security etc.)
IANAL, but my understanding is that including the software package in the product/service name this would potentially open your company up to a trademark suit, because it potentiates customer confusion regarding the things that Elastic is complaining about w/r/t Amazon's offerings of Elasticsearch.
Personally, I find that thinking about this issue seems more intuitive when imagining tangible physical products. Imagine that Amazon decides to enter the Cookies as a Service market, and starts launching service offerings with names like 'Oreos by Amazon'. At a glance, would one not assume that this was some sort of collaborative effort between Nabisco and Amazon? I think the average consumer would. And the same probably applies in a situation involving a software product.
Specifically to your example (I think), see "Company, Product or Service Names
", where it states the following:
> Do not use Oracle trademarks or potentially confusing variations as all or part of your company, product or service names. If you wish to note the relationship of your products or services to Oracle products or services, please use an appropriate tag line as detailed above. For example, "XYZ for Oracle database" not "OraXYZ or XYZ Oracle"
"When the service launched, imagine our surprise when the Amazon CTO tweeted that the service was released in collaboration with us. It was not. And over the years, we have heard repeatedly that this confusion persists. NOT OK."
"So imagine our surprise when Amazon launched their service in 2015 based on Elasticsearch and called it Amazon Elasticsearch Service. We consider this to be a pretty obvious trademark violation. NOT OK."
"When Amazon announced their Open Distro for Elasticsearch fork, they used code that we believe was copied by a third party from our commercial code and provided it as part of the Open Distro project. We believe this further divided our community and drove additional confusion. "