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Comment by wazoox | Hacker News Reader

Amazon illegally uses the ElasticSearch trademark. Amazon illegally uses and distributes proprietary Elastic's code. Why do people in the thread keeps repeating that it's OK while it's very obviously abuse by a too-powerful company?

More generally I can't understand (and can't stand either) why people keep defending monopolists on HN. Monopolies are bad, morally, economically, in all sort of ways. They fuel abuse and everyone loses in the end but the handful of plutocrats that control Amazon, Google, Facebook, Microsoft etc.

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Neither of these issues have anything to do with the license.

Either Elastic's code used by Amazon is indeed stolen proprietary code and no licensing change is needed to obtain reparation, or Amazon is making lawful use of FOSS source code and the question boils down to "if I publish code under a FOSS license, can anybody use it?", to which the answer is obviously yes. And if you'd prefer it to be "no" then don't publish FOSS.

Regarding the trademark, this indeed seems (to my non-lawyer eyes) to be an infringement (or extremely borderline at the very least) but isn't related to licensing.

The trademark has to do with licensing insofar as if a major reseller of your OSS licensed product will infringe on your trademark, the easiest solution might be to modify the license. Especially when the alternative is lengthy trademark disputes with a huge company with a lot of lawyers.

At the end of the day offering an OSS license becomes less viable when it seems like major players aren’t playing fairly.

Typically the standard for trademark cases is whether or not customers will confuse the two competing names/products/brands.

It's quite possible that because both companies target developers, architects, etc who're more than able to distinguish between the two companies' offerings... that Elastic's lawsuits didn't go anywhere

Sophisticated Users are definitely one factor that weight in favor of developers, but in my view it’s outweighed by the degree of similarity of the two marks, the similarity of the services, the uniqueness of Elastic as a mark, evidence of actual confusion (before reading Elastic’s complaint, I was confused by the names, and I’ve been involved in making decisions about the use of these kinds of services.)

IANAL but I don't think this is infringing.

Your allowed to sell Apple Macs and advertise them as "Bob's Apple Mac store" without paying any royalties to Apple.

Similarly, Amazon can deploy the open-source ElasticSearch product, and deploy it, unaltered using the trademark.

> Your allowed to sell Apple Macs and advertise them as "Bob's Apple Mac store" without paying any royalties to Apple.

I don't think you can name your store "Bob Apple Mac Store". You can advertise that you can buy an Apple Mac at "Bob's Computer Store".

Trademark law goes by category. Elastic uses theirs for a software product as well as a service, whereas Amazon is using it for their cloud services (not as a standalone software product). This is why Apple Corps (music, Beatles) and Apple Computer Inc. were allowed to coexist.

This situation is a very fine line between the technicalities that the trademark law was written for. Amazon knows this, and they have the money to set legal precedent in court to have it their way. And so stomping on Elastic's trademark is the route they chose to further benefit from that company's reputation.

If it ends up being ruled that Amazon infringed on Elastic's trademark (their case here is pretty flimsy) or copied Elastic's proprietary code then Amazon deserves to get raked over the coals for copyright infringement.

But Amazon offering hosted Elasticsearch and forking the project is something that I think is okay. It sucks for Elastic but it's good for customers. Amazon is driving the cost of hosted Elasticsearch down closer to its real costs which will always out-compete Elastic who's trying to use their margin to fund development as well. So many businesses fall into the trap of not charging for their actual value and get eaten when someone else is better at their paid complementary services. Elastic's value is the software, not their hosting abilities.

The entitlement in this thread is staggering.

> It sucks for Elastic but it's good for customers.

Everyone is seemingly happy with ES not being able to monetise the product they build for the community, to subsidise the thousands of developer hours spent on it, so their company can save a few dollars. They (you) would rather than money go to Amazon for providing.. nothing to the ES community.

No, I would rather ES built a sustainable business selling their software with a normal licensing model that makes sure they're getting paid no matter who's hosting it. In that world it doesn't matter if AWS or Google or Microsoft or anyone else want to offer hosted versions of it because ES still gets their cut.

But co-opting open source to grow your user-base and then switching your license because you don't like the reality of what open source actually entails leaves a bad taste in everyone's mouth.

yes, all these points are quite true.

but the elephant in the room is that there are perfectly acceptable ways to make money off of an open source project and HELP them keep afloat by regular DONATIONS/man power/hosting/etc.

> Amazon illegally uses the ElasticSearch trademark.

If we accept Elastic's interpretation of trademark law, all retail is illegal.

I bought some break cereal at Walmart this morning that clearly displayed a "Kellog" trademark. Walk down any isle of the store, unauthorized use of trademarks as far as the eye can see. NOT OK.

If you try to open a series of stores with Kellog in the name, you'll get slapped down right away. And that's obviously the problem here, putting it right in the name in a way that gives no hint it's someone else's trademark.

> If you try to open a series of stores with Kellog in the name, you'll get slapped down right away.

Fair enough. I still don't think Amazon is violating trademark here, but my analogy was unnecessarily dismissive.

> Amazon illegally uses the ElasticSearch trademark. Amazon illegally uses and distributes proprietary Elastic's code.

Those are interesting and specific accusations. Got any proof?

That's right in the article.

There is a link in the article to a separate post: https://www.elastic.co/blog/dear-search-guard-users-includin.... I think this is what it is referring to.

I read that article and it is very redolent of what SCO argued back in the day. If they had actual proof, they would take legal action against the author of that plugin.

> I read that article [...] If they had actual proof, they would take legal action against the author of that plugin.

The first sentence of that article:

> Back on September 4th, we filed a lawsuit against floragunn GmbH, the makers of Search Guard, a security plugin for Elasticsearch

Yeah? SCO sued a bunch of people too. They haven't won, though.

Elastic and Floragunn are unrelated to SCO.

They share a similarity: the Floragunn litigation is unresolved (and clearly Floragunn continues to distribute their plugin). SCO, too, failed to resolve their litigation favorably to SCO.

That is a very tenuous connection. Floragunn has not resolved the litigation in their favour, either.

If we are going off similarities, Napster also continued to distribute their software while their lawsuit involving the RIAA was unresolved. The court still ruled against them eventually.

They did in September 2019. Is literally the first sentence of the linked article and it links to https://www.elastic.co/blog/dear-search-guard-users.

I am not sure of the outcome.

Amazon's poor behavior doesn't excuse Elastic's poor behavior.

Amazon's violation of Elastic's trademark is an issue between two companies: Amazon & Elastic. Elastic has the courts available to them to pursue their case.

Elastric's change of license affects the larger open source and technical communities and it's understandable that contributors who supported the open source project are upset when Elastic changes the nature of the relationship.

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