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Their license literally says they have the right to use this code as they're doing, shouldn't be mad at them for that. Imagine putting a sign on your lawn that

Their license literally says they have the right to use this code as they're doing, shouldn't be mad at them for that. Imagine putting a sign on your lawn that says people can walk on your lawn and are even allowed to poop on it if they feel like it and then getting mad at them when they do so. That being said, I support their right to change their license to whatever they like if it helps them survive as a business or for whatever reason they see fit obviously, more power to them.

david_draco 6y ago
Use the code yes, but not use the trademarks. And also not publicly claim to collaborate when they actually do not give back. That's what they complain about.
d3nj4l 6y ago
That is not the point. There is legal and there is good - and simply reiterating that something is legal is unproductive and pointless.
- shawnz 6y ago
  I don't think the person you are replying to is making any kind of argument about legality. I think they are saying that when you tell people something is acceptable, then they can only assume it actually is acceptable to you.
  - patrickaljord 6y ago
    Exactly, what Amazon did isn't just legal, it is explicitly specified as OK by the license that the elastic search team selected for their code.
    - NeutronStar 6y ago
      "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." Is that legal by your standards?
  - Pet_Ant 6y ago
    > I think they are saying that when you tell people something is acceptable, then they can only assume it actually is acceptable to you. I think that is false. Most things that are said assume that the listener will self-moderate. If I have Crohn's or IBS and I post a sign on my front-lawn saying "bathroom free to use for those in need" I'm not expecting you to pull up a tour-bus full of tourists, move into it and use it as housing, or a sex den for turning tricks. I mean, I should clarify my sign, but honestly if you don't meet me half-way with self-moderation, you are the reason we can't have nice things. Above all, make sure you always leave money on the table, _especially_ if you are the bigger party.
    - shawnz 6y ago
      Sure, there is something to be said for reciprocating the generosity offered to you by taking only what you need. I think this can become a complicated game of accounting though. Did Amazon take more than they need or did they just build a useful cloud service on top of a widespread open and free product that was released intentionally under those terms? When Elastic chose the Apache license, what was the goal? Was it to allow as many people to benefit from the software as possible? If so, Amazon is clearly advancing that goal, not hindering it. Or is the idea that Amazon is somehow blocking Elastic from competing in the cloud search space? Elastic is growing quite rapidly and Amazon's use of ES seems to have only accelerated that growth, so I don't really buy that either. Furthermore consider this: Is Elastic reciprocating the generosity offered by Apache and the Lucene project, to which they basically did the same thing that Amazon did to them?
    - matz1 6y ago
      >I'm not expecting you to pull up a tour-bus full of tourists, move into it and use it as housing, or a sex den for turning tricks But you should expecting that, you can't assume the listener will self-moderate.
      - Pet_Ant 6y ago
        Really? If someone comes over and you say "help yourself to anything in the fridge" you shouldn't expect that someone will take a snack and not clear out your fridge and load up there car with groceries for the week?
- danShumway 6y ago
  This isn't really the spirit of Open Source though. The point of Open Source is that reuse and modification isn't just technically allowed legally, it's encouraged. I fully support their right to change their licensing, and I understand they may not have thought through the implications of their license -- and I empathize with that. I also empathize with criticism that Amazon isn't doing a great job of supporting the ecosystem that supports them, it would be nice if they did more. And it goes without saying, but I also strongly empathize with the frustration about the borderline trademark infringement that's happening here. That's a completely separate problem. But I don't like the implication that Open Source licenses are a legal technicality rather than a specific philosophical choice to allow reuse. People don't need to feel guilty about following Open Source licenses, the idea is to encourage reuse -- even by corporations. We do harm to that movement when we try and backtrack from that philosophy or say, "sure, you have the legal right to reuse the code, but we're going to try and implement social/technical barriers to you doing so." There are plenty of decent source-available licenses projects can use if that's their intent. They carve out exceptions for small-scale reuse while trying to limit companies like Amazon from capitalizing on the ecosystem. And maybe more projects should use those licenses since they more accurately reflect the outcomes that the authors seem to want. There's nothing wrong with having projects that allow only small-scale reuse. But if someone releases their project as Open Source I'm going to treat it like Open Source, because that's what the movement is about, and trying to reverse the legal progress we've made by constructing new moral barriers in front of reuse is harmful to that movement. When we say that people have a moral right to reuse, adapt, and share our code, we mean it.
  - eropple 6y ago
    Open source may be a moral system, but Karl Popper had a thing or two to say about actors who take advantage of the morality of a system for immoral ends. At some point, whether you or I appreciate it, the open source world was bound to have to reinvent a solution to that.
    - danShumway 6y ago
      There is a solution to that already, it's called using source available licensing instead of Open Source. But the point of Open Source is that reciprocity of code/money/value is not required. That's literally the scenario that many of us are trying to build. It feels like the difference here is that you're looking at "someone builds a giant public hosting service off of our code" as an immoral end. But I'm saying that's not immoral, that is an acceptable result. It's obviously not the result Elastic wanted, and I empathize with that, but... I don't know, maybe we need to educate people more about what Open Source actually means. Maybe we need to encourage more people to use source available licenses if there's a disconnect in how people understand the actual goals of the movement. We believe that people have an intrinsic, moral right to share and reuse code. Not just good citizens who help build up the system and support us -- everybody.
Jonnax 6y ago
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. "
- patrickaljord 6y ago
  > "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.
  - 6y ago
nrmitchi 6y ago
> Imagine putting a sign on your lawn that says people can walk on your lawn and are even allowed to poop on it if they feel like it and then getting mad at them when they do so. I mean, sure. Someone can poop on the lawn. There is a difference between that, and some business coming along with a dump truck full of shit that they then dump on the lawn, and I'm sure you understand that.
- signal11 6y ago
  While the imagery is evocative, scale of usage isn't a factor in open source licenses, so the metaphor sort of breaks apart. Sun found that out the hard way -- IBM probably profited off Java way more than pre-acquisition Sun.
- wokwokwok 6y ago
  This is meaningless analogy; no one is pooping here. Whats happening is they’re selling the same product; legally they’re entitled to do so. They’re selling it in a deceptive (perhaps even legally dubious way), and thats not ok; but forget that, this has nothing really to do with being the good guys for open source and amazon being the bad guys, thats just the narrative that the elastic PR folk are putting out. What’s happening here is being out-competed by people selling the same product, because despite being technically inferior (in my view) the competition can sell more of it more cheaply and not really care about the margins. So... yes, I’m sympathetic, but this PR dance we go through every time pains me. Just say it: we’re struggling. We cant compete with Amazon on equal terms, so we’re changing the license to force them to pay us royalties, or stop selling it. You’re not doing it from the goodness of your heart, and if amazon wasn’t kicking your ass, you wouldn’t care, you’d just be laughing at them “trying to run a cloud version of elastic, ha!”. ...but amazon is very very good at that, actually, and very good at selling it. Who’s going to judge you for not having amazons scale? No one; but they’re not being dicks, they’re doing their jobs, very successfully. If you don’t like losing, that’s perfectly ok, no one does... but it doesnt make them bad, it just means they’re better at it than you. Changing things to preserve your competitive edge is totally ok; but I don’t think its right to spin this us-them AWS is the evil empire narrative; youre in this situation because of the decisions you made, take a bit of humble pie and acknowledge responsibility for it as well.
sithadmin 6y ago
Glancing at the referenced lawsuits[1,2], the point of contention is not that Elastic's open source code is being used. It's that a.) Elastic feels its trademark is being abused in a manner that misrepresents the relationship between Elastic and Amazon, and b.) that Open Distro incorporates code in a manner that explicitly violates Elastic's licensing. [1]https://images.law.com/contrib/content/uploads/documents/403/40510/ElasticSearch-v.-Amazon.com_.Elastic-complaint.pdf https://images.law.com/contrib/content/uploads/documents/403... [2]https://www.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cand.347725/gov.uscourts.cand.347725.1.0.pdf https://www.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cand.347725...
- Waterluvian 6y ago
  That tweet about the partnership is a pretty damning exhibit to a trademark infringement suit. And yeah, "Amazon Elasticsearch Service" completely fooled me for about a week until Google searches revealed enough about how elastic.co isn't just a site promoting Elasticsearch, but was a provider of instance configuration.
motives 6y ago
I don't believe the issue most are taking here is the license itself that elasticsearch now has, I think its the relicensing of existing contributions (ironically including those from AWS and their employees) which were originally under a true, well-accepted and liberal FOSS license. If elasticsearch had this license from day one, that would be fair enough, but many people do not freely contribute time and effort to improving something which is not freely available to all others (whether individual or large corporation). Elasticsearch is self-victimising here when they are arguably exploiting FOSS contributors good will (though due to the CLA what they are doing is most definitely legal).
- jjoonathan 6y ago
  > ironically including those from AWS and their employees Does AWS ever contribute anything that isn't an AWS integration? I'm not asking rhetorically -- those are the only kind of "contribution" I've ever seen from them.
  - motives 6y ago
    Quoting another earlier comment from an elasticsearch thread here, credits to user _msw_ (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25783509 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25783509): https://github.com/elastic/elasticsearch/pull/61400 https://github.com/elastic/elasticsearch/pull/61400 https://github.com/elastic/elasticsearch/pull/59563 https://github.com/elastic/elasticsearch/pull/59563 https://github.com/elastic/elasticsearch/pull/57271 https://github.com/elastic/elasticsearch/pull/57271 https://github.com/elastic/elasticsearch/pull/53643 https://github.com/elastic/elasticsearch/pull/53643 . None of the above appear to be related to AWS specific APIs and offer a small sample of total contributions from AWS employees.
- alisonkisk 6y ago
  Elastic is not and legally cannot change the license of code contributed in the past. That code will always carry the original license.
  - motives 6y ago
okl 6y ago
I agree, and if they had a problem with it, why didn't they say so 5 years ago?
pfsalter 6y ago
The license for the main Elasticsearch is that, but they have some proprietary features (Machine Learning etc.) which are under a proprietary license. Amazon copied code from another project which had stolen this proprietary code from Elastic and resold it under their own banner. https://www.elastic.co/blog/dear-search-guard-users https://www.elastic.co/blog/dear-search-guard-users
indymike 6y ago
Most of the issues in the article were about misuse of the Elasticsearch trademark. This seems like a fairly simple problem to deal with. AWS should not be competing with Elasticsearch using it's own trademark. The licensing changes really do nothing to solve the bad behavior by Amazon.
globular-toast 6y ago
It's more like having the sign say "feel free to do what you like" then someone poops on the lawn and you sigh and have to update the sign to say "no pooping, though". Most free/open source software licences come from a different time. In most cases they are applied because the authors want to do open source and it's expected that the licence is enough to uphold that spirit. But it's not enough and hasn't been for a long time now. The AGPL was created for this reason but oddly developers have gone the opposite direction and "permissive" licences have become the fashion. Many of them are now realising there was a reason for licences like GPL and AGPL after all.
Havoc 6y ago
>Their license literally says [...] Hence the license change yes?
- vntok 6y ago
  Too late, licensing changes are not retroactive.
blackoil 6y ago
Another view, they opened/maintained a lawn wherein you can come have picnic and may buy some drinks from the store, which covers the cost. Now a super chain opens next to them and uses park as free seating for its customer. So they are adding rule against that.
eeZah7Ux 6y ago
No. You are confusing between following FOSS licensing to the letter and following the spirit.
detritus 6y ago
I'm just a bystander in this regard as it's not really my domain, but have played around with AWS a bit and I must admit, I didn't realise that ElasticSearch wasn't Amazon's own product per se. Seems to me that Amazon has grossly overstepped fair play here.
kemitchell 6y ago
> Their license literally says they have the right to use this code as they're doing, shouldn't be mad at them for that. Apache 2.0, section 6: > 6. Trademarks. This License does not grant permission to use the trade names, trademarks, service marks, or product names of the Licensor, except as required for reasonable and customary use in describing the origin of the Work and reproducing the content of the NOTICE file.

david_draco 6y ago

Use the code yes, but not use the trademarks. And also not publicly claim to collaborate when they actually do not give back. That's what they complain about.

d3nj4l 6y ago

That is not the point. There is legal and there is good - and simply reiterating that something is legal is unproductive and pointless.

shawnz 6y ago
I don't think the person you are replying to is making any kind of argument about legality. I think they are saying that when you tell people something is acceptable, then they can only assume it actually is acceptable to you.
- patrickaljord 6y ago
  Exactly, what Amazon did isn't just legal, it is explicitly specified as OK by the license that the elastic search team selected for their code.
  - NeutronStar 6y ago
    "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." Is that legal by your standards?
- Pet_Ant 6y ago
  > I think they are saying that when you tell people something is acceptable, then they can only assume it actually is acceptable to you. I think that is false. Most things that are said assume that the listener will self-moderate. If I have Crohn's or IBS and I post a sign on my front-lawn saying "bathroom free to use for those in need" I'm not expecting you to pull up a tour-bus full of tourists, move into it and use it as housing, or a sex den for turning tricks. I mean, I should clarify my sign, but honestly if you don't meet me half-way with self-moderation, you are the reason we can't have nice things. Above all, make sure you always leave money on the table, _especially_ if you are the bigger party.
  - shawnz 6y ago
    Sure, there is something to be said for reciprocating the generosity offered to you by taking only what you need. I think this can become a complicated game of accounting though. Did Amazon take more than they need or did they just build a useful cloud service on top of a widespread open and free product that was released intentionally under those terms? When Elastic chose the Apache license, what was the goal? Was it to allow as many people to benefit from the software as possible? If so, Amazon is clearly advancing that goal, not hindering it. Or is the idea that Amazon is somehow blocking Elastic from competing in the cloud search space? Elastic is growing quite rapidly and Amazon's use of ES seems to have only accelerated that growth, so I don't really buy that either. Furthermore consider this: Is Elastic reciprocating the generosity offered by Apache and the Lucene project, to which they basically did the same thing that Amazon did to them?
  - matz1 6y ago
    >I'm not expecting you to pull up a tour-bus full of tourists, move into it and use it as housing, or a sex den for turning tricks But you should expecting that, you can't assume the listener will self-moderate.
    - Pet_Ant 6y ago
      Really? If someone comes over and you say "help yourself to anything in the fridge" you shouldn't expect that someone will take a snack and not clear out your fridge and load up there car with groceries for the week?
danShumway 6y ago
This isn't really the spirit of Open Source though. The point of Open Source is that reuse and modification isn't just technically allowed legally, it's encouraged. I fully support their right to change their licensing, and I understand they may not have thought through the implications of their license -- and I empathize with that. I also empathize with criticism that Amazon isn't doing a great job of supporting the ecosystem that supports them, it would be nice if they did more. And it goes without saying, but I also strongly empathize with the frustration about the borderline trademark infringement that's happening here. That's a completely separate problem. But I don't like the implication that Open Source licenses are a legal technicality rather than a specific philosophical choice to allow reuse. People don't need to feel guilty about following Open Source licenses, the idea is to encourage reuse -- even by corporations. We do harm to that movement when we try and backtrack from that philosophy or say, "sure, you have the legal right to reuse the code, but we're going to try and implement social/technical barriers to you doing so." There are plenty of decent source-available licenses projects can use if that's their intent. They carve out exceptions for small-scale reuse while trying to limit companies like Amazon from capitalizing on the ecosystem. And maybe more projects should use those licenses since they more accurately reflect the outcomes that the authors seem to want. There's nothing wrong with having projects that allow only small-scale reuse. But if someone releases their project as Open Source I'm going to treat it like Open Source, because that's what the movement is about, and trying to reverse the legal progress we've made by constructing new moral barriers in front of reuse is harmful to that movement. When we say that people have a moral right to reuse, adapt, and share our code, we mean it.
- eropple 6y ago
  Open source may be a moral system, but Karl Popper had a thing or two to say about actors who take advantage of the morality of a system for immoral ends. At some point, whether you or I appreciate it, the open source world was bound to have to reinvent a solution to that.
  - danShumway 6y ago
    There is a solution to that already, it's called using source available licensing instead of Open Source. But the point of Open Source is that reciprocity of code/money/value is not required. That's literally the scenario that many of us are trying to build. It feels like the difference here is that you're looking at "someone builds a giant public hosting service off of our code" as an immoral end. But I'm saying that's not immoral, that is an acceptable result. It's obviously not the result Elastic wanted, and I empathize with that, but... I don't know, maybe we need to educate people more about what Open Source actually means. Maybe we need to encourage more people to use source available licenses if there's a disconnect in how people understand the actual goals of the movement. We believe that people have an intrinsic, moral right to share and reuse code. Not just good citizens who help build up the system and support us -- everybody.

Jonnax 6y ago

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. "

patrickaljord 6y ago
> "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.
- 6y ago

nrmitchi 6y ago

> Imagine putting a sign on your lawn that says people can walk on your lawn and are even allowed to poop on it if they feel like it and then getting mad at them when they do so. I mean, sure. Someone can poop on the lawn. There is a difference between that, and some business coming along with a dump truck full of shit that they then dump on the lawn, and I'm sure you understand that.

signal11 6y ago
While the imagery is evocative, scale of usage isn't a factor in open source licenses, so the metaphor sort of breaks apart. Sun found that out the hard way -- IBM probably profited off Java way more than pre-acquisition Sun.
wokwokwok 6y ago
This is meaningless analogy; no one is pooping here. Whats happening is they’re selling the same product; legally they’re entitled to do so. They’re selling it in a deceptive (perhaps even legally dubious way), and thats not ok; but forget that, this has nothing really to do with being the good guys for open source and amazon being the bad guys, thats just the narrative that the elastic PR folk are putting out. What’s happening here is being out-competed by people selling the same product, because despite being technically inferior (in my view) the competition can sell more of it more cheaply and not really care about the margins. So... yes, I’m sympathetic, but this PR dance we go through every time pains me. Just say it: we’re struggling. We cant compete with Amazon on equal terms, so we’re changing the license to force them to pay us royalties, or stop selling it. You’re not doing it from the goodness of your heart, and if amazon wasn’t kicking your ass, you wouldn’t care, you’d just be laughing at them “trying to run a cloud version of elastic, ha!”. ...but amazon is very very good at that, actually, and very good at selling it. Who’s going to judge you for not having amazons scale? No one; but they’re not being dicks, they’re doing their jobs, very successfully. If you don’t like losing, that’s perfectly ok, no one does... but it doesnt make them bad, it just means they’re better at it than you. Changing things to preserve your competitive edge is totally ok; but I don’t think its right to spin this us-them AWS is the evil empire narrative; youre in this situation because of the decisions you made, take a bit of humble pie and acknowledge responsibility for it as well.

sithadmin 6y ago

Glancing at the referenced lawsuits[1,2], the point of contention is not that Elastic's open source code is being used. It's that a.) Elastic feels its trademark is being abused in a manner that misrepresents the relationship between Elastic and Amazon, and b.) that Open Distro incorporates code in a manner that explicitly violates Elastic's licensing. [1]https://images.law.com/contrib/content/uploads/documents/403/40510/ElasticSearch-v.-Amazon.com_.Elastic-complaint.pdf https://images.law.com/contrib/content/uploads/documents/403... [2]https://www.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cand.347725/gov.uscourts.cand.347725.1.0.pdf https://www.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cand.347725...

Waterluvian 6y ago
That tweet about the partnership is a pretty damning exhibit to a trademark infringement suit. And yeah, "Amazon Elasticsearch Service" completely fooled me for about a week until Google searches revealed enough about how elastic.co isn't just a site promoting Elasticsearch, but was a provider of instance configuration.

motives 6y ago

I don't believe the issue most are taking here is the license itself that elasticsearch now has, I think its the relicensing of existing contributions (ironically including those from AWS and their employees) which were originally under a true, well-accepted and liberal FOSS license. If elasticsearch had this license from day one, that would be fair enough, but many people do not freely contribute time and effort to improving something which is not freely available to all others (whether individual or large corporation). Elasticsearch is self-victimising here when they are arguably exploiting FOSS contributors good will (though due to the CLA what they are doing is most definitely legal).

jjoonathan 6y ago
> ironically including those from AWS and their employees Does AWS ever contribute anything that isn't an AWS integration? I'm not asking rhetorically -- those are the only kind of "contribution" I've ever seen from them.
- motives 6y ago
  Quoting another earlier comment from an elasticsearch thread here, credits to user _msw_ (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25783509 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25783509): https://github.com/elastic/elasticsearch/pull/61400 https://github.com/elastic/elasticsearch/pull/61400 https://github.com/elastic/elasticsearch/pull/59563 https://github.com/elastic/elasticsearch/pull/59563 https://github.com/elastic/elasticsearch/pull/57271 https://github.com/elastic/elasticsearch/pull/57271 https://github.com/elastic/elasticsearch/pull/53643 https://github.com/elastic/elasticsearch/pull/53643 . None of the above appear to be related to AWS specific APIs and offer a small sample of total contributions from AWS employees.
alisonkisk 6y ago
Elastic is not and legally cannot change the license of code contributed in the past. That code will always carry the original license.
- motives 6y ago

okl 6y ago

I agree, and if they had a problem with it, why didn't they say so 5 years ago?

pfsalter 6y ago

The license for the main Elasticsearch is that, but they have some proprietary features (Machine Learning etc.) which are under a proprietary license. Amazon copied code from another project which had stolen this proprietary code from Elastic and resold it under their own banner. https://www.elastic.co/blog/dear-search-guard-users https://www.elastic.co/blog/dear-search-guard-users

indymike 6y ago

Most of the issues in the article were about misuse of the Elasticsearch trademark. This seems like a fairly simple problem to deal with. AWS should not be competing with Elasticsearch using it's own trademark. The licensing changes really do nothing to solve the bad behavior by Amazon.

globular-toast 6y ago

It's more like having the sign say "feel free to do what you like" then someone poops on the lawn and you sigh and have to update the sign to say "no pooping, though". Most free/open source software licences come from a different time. In most cases they are applied because the authors want to do open source and it's expected that the licence is enough to uphold that spirit. But it's not enough and hasn't been for a long time now. The AGPL was created for this reason but oddly developers have gone the opposite direction and "permissive" licences have become the fashion. Many of them are now realising there was a reason for licences like GPL and AGPL after all.

Havoc 6y ago

>Their license literally says [...] Hence the license change yes?

vntok 6y ago
Too late, licensing changes are not retroactive.

blackoil 6y ago

Another view, they opened/maintained a lawn wherein you can come have picnic and may buy some drinks from the store, which covers the cost. Now a super chain opens next to them and uses park as free seating for its customer. So they are adding rule against that.

eeZah7Ux 6y ago

No. You are confusing between following FOSS licensing to the letter and following the spirit.

detritus 6y ago

I'm just a bystander in this regard as it's not really my domain, but have played around with AWS a bit and I must admit, I didn't realise that ElasticSearch wasn't Amazon's own product per se. Seems to me that Amazon has grossly overstepped fair play here.

kemitchell 6y ago

> Their license literally says they have the right to use this code as they're doing, shouldn't be mad at them for that. Apache 2.0, section 6: > 6. Trademarks. This License does not grant permission to use the trade names, trademarks, service marks, or product names of the Licensor, except as required for reasonable and customary use in describing the origin of the Work and reproducing the content of the NOTICE file.