I assume the trademark thing should be a slam dunk? That seems like the most blatant trademark violation ever.
Also:
>Our efforts to resolve the problem with Amazon failed, forcing us to file a lawsuit. NOT OK.
This and several other sentences alleging illegal behavior on the part of Amazon seem suspicious to me. When I hear someone say that they had to sue another company, but provide no further details of the suit, then I can only assume that their lawsuit was summarily dismissed by the judge. Otherwise, they'd talk about the litigation - there is no legal condition I could think of where you would be allowed to disclose the existence of a lawsuit and make general allegations about a company, but not disclose the existence of at least a settlement agreement, if not a legal judgment.
Does anyone know if Elastic's Amazon lawsuit went anywhere?
(AWS had EC2 before Elastic’s trademark was registered.)
FTA: 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.
In this specific case, it doesn't seem tricky to me. When you have concrete examples of people getting confused, no speculation is needed.
As a user, I don't care in the least about the business relationship behind the product. I care about whether Amazon RDS works like SQL Server and whether Amazon Elasticsearch Service works like Elasticsearch. What financial arrangements, if any, are behind the scenes are not a concern to users.
From Amazon's perspective, if they contributed a single fix, or asked a single question of ElasticSearch on the issue tracker, then this is a product born from colloboration.
It's difficult to think anyone is going to think that Amazon ElasticSearch is by anyone other than Amazon.
Isn't that just Nominative fair use: referencing a mark to identify the actual goods and services that the trademark holder identifies with the mark?
Especially when it launched and there wasn't a fork.
Doesn't elastic also use Amazon trademarks in their code and documentation? (e.g. ec2, etc..)? I'm not a licence expert, but maybe if you have a have a legal licence to run it, you probably can also name it like that?