9 ms·

I think I have grown a rather hard stance on this over the years: putting an open source license on a product isn't a business model. It's, by and large, a part

I think I have grown a rather hard stance on this over the years: putting an open source license on a product isn't a business model. It's, by and large, a part of a larger business model. A license is a choice. It means you choose to not gain revenue by directly licensing the IP. Instead, you choose to put the code out there without any further legal obligations on your part as well as those who use that code. It also means that you have to find alternate ways of making revenue e.g. by providing consultancy, building services or licensing the trademark (which is an entirely different ball game from open sourcing the code!). The trouble isn't that Amazon decided to use ElasticSearch in their own offering. The trouble is that Amazon simply out-competes ElasticSearch with their own product when it comes to consultancy, services, etc. To add insult to injury, Amazon made the mistake of leveraging the ElasticSearch brand a few times too many in ways that just rub the ElasticSearch people the wrong way. Of course, the founders of ES could never predict how successful their product would become after a decade. There are plenty of open source products engineered by commercial companies that never catch the eye of behemoths like Amazon.

StavrosK 6y ago
> The trouble is that Amazon simply out-competes ElasticSearch with their own product when it comes to consultancy, services, etc. I don't know if it out-competes them on those terms exactly, rather than the advantage of "Well I'm already on AWS and they offer an ES service so why not just use that".
- spinningslate 6y ago
  true - but that's exactly how it out-competes. It's a repeating pattern. Setting up an agreement with a 3rd party provider has friction. The bigger the client, the higher the friction. If $BIGCO has an enterprise agreement with $BIGCLOUD, then $SERVICE hosted on $BIGCLOUD is nearly always going to win against $SERVICE's own commercial offering.
  - nicoburns 6y ago
    Right, but that's the sort of setup that's detrimental to society and therefore we ought to consider regulating or otherwise setting up an environment that is disadvantageous to it.
    - julienb_sea 6y ago
      Why do enterprises make it difficult to add a new vendor? Because they are careful with their data and legal obligations. Regulatory and auditing obligations are no joke and onboarding a new vendor is a nontrivial problem to do in a compliant fashion. The only aspect of this which is "detrimental to society" arguably is the legal requirements, but even then you might argue its better for a large organization to pay attention to other companies' licenses instead of stepping on them.
      - ethbr0 6y ago
        The key enabler here is IAM and data (at rest and moving). If we want to encourage free markets, the GDPR et al. need to be very careful to disincentivize "traffic within different parts of the same entity." As is, if my regulatory compliance is satisfied through AWS's data and IAM handling, then if an Amazon-hosted service better integrates with those components, it strictly dominates competition. That's a pretty unregulatable quality, and one easily optimized by Amazon (for itself), and impossibly by everyone else (on Amazon). This weaponizes data protection regulation into a moat around large everything-and-the-kitchen-sink I/PaaS providers. There needs to be balance between (a) protecting data & (b) ensuring a competitive ecosystem with multiple viable solutions.
      - nicoburns 6y ago
        The other way in which they are detrimental to society is by taking revenue away from companies such as elastic that are actually developing technology. In general there is economic hazard with any large company. There are also benefits and I don't think they should be eliminated entirely. But I do think they should be curtailed and the economy biased towards smaller companies.
      - 6y ago
- ako 6y ago
  Correct. Customers are looking for a cloud platform to run their apps, all the services are just features. Elastic is a feature, event bus is a feature, database is a feature, compute is a feature.
- killingtime74 6y ago
  Do you not think distribution is part of a product?
nrmitchi 6y ago
> Amazon simply out-competes ElasticSearch with their own product when it comes to consultancy, services You're kind of right about this, but it's the issue that AWS just has a massive head-start with any client that already uses AWS. They don't really out-compete, they just use their existing vendor lock-in to gain an advantage. And really, by using your dominance in one "market" to gain an advantage elsewhere ends up feeling like a bit of a grey area. > To add insult to injury, Amazon made the mistake of leveraging the ElasticSearch brand a few times too many in ways that just rub the ElasticSearch people the wrong way. You're phrasing this in a way like Amazon "leveraging the ElasticSearch brand" isn't a trademark issue. Is "leveraging the trademarks of another company" suddenly okay (as long as you don't do it 'a few times too many') as long as you're Amazon? What if Amazon started selling smart thermostats by "leveraging" the Nest brand?
- ardy42 6y ago
  > You're kind of right about this, but it's the issue that AWS just has a massive head-start with any client that already uses AWS. They don't really out-compete, they just use their existing vendor lock-in to gain an advantage. And really, by using your dominance in one "market" to gain an advantage elsewhere ends up feeling like a bit of a grey area. I'm not sure if it's actually a gray area, since I'm pretty sure leveraging your market dominance in one area to compete in another is illegal anti-competitive behavior. Isn't that what the whole Microsoft antitrust case was about? It's too bad the government pretty much gave up on enforcing antitrust law for 20 years, since it feels like similar practices became normalized due to lack of enforcement.
  - notatoad 6y ago
    > leveraging your market dominance in one area to compete in another is illegal Leveraging your monopoly to compete in another area is illegal. Leveraging a strong position isn’t and Amazon is a long ways from a monopoly.
    - ardy42 6y ago
      > Leveraging your monopoly to compete in another area is illegal. Leveraging a strong position isn’t and Amazon is a long ways from a monopoly. That really depends on interpretation, which has shifted over time and continues to shift. IIRC, recent interpretations of some types of anti-competitive behavior have been rather literal and required something very close to a literal monopoly, which has had the effect of neutering antitrust law in all but the most blatant of cases. My understanding is that it's arguable that it's anti-competitive to leverage market share advantages more broadly (e.g. antitrust law could be used to constrain/break-up a duopoly).
rileymat2 6y ago
> The trouble isn't that Amazon decided to use ElasticSearch in their own offering. The trouble is that Amazon simply out-competes ElasticSearch with their own product when it comes to consultancy, services, etc. I kind of disagree here, the main reason it outcompetes is based on the network of linked self serve services in the ecosystem. We spend a ton of money on Amazon in general, and I would not tout thier consultancy as being anything but ok if not underwhelming.
- CaptArmchair 6y ago
  That's a fair point. > it outcompetes is based on the network of linked self serve services in the ecosystem You have to differentiate between business concerns. First, the concern of those who are willing to buy an IP license because they think the product is useful to them (akin to buying a Windows license key). ES doesn't make any revenue here. They don't sell IP licenses. That's a direct consequence of putting an open source license on your product. Anyone can just get a copy of the code and spin up their own instance, no strings attached. Second, the market of those who are looking towards assistance in using the product (consultancy, support, servicing, hosting,...). You can spin up your own instance and do all the work yourself independently. But for organizations, operating software is an expense: often it's cheaper to outsource those costs towards specialists... such as ES offering consultancy services. The product license and the type of support you want/need are different business concerns. You can choose to an open source product and host everything yourself, you can choose a closed source product and host it yourself, or you can outsource hosting and support to a partner like ES or AWS. > We spend a ton of money on Amazon in general, and I would not tout thier consultancy as being anything but ok if not underwhelming. Don't get me wrong here... But the moment you open up your wallet for AWS, you've already contributed to AWS' market position against ES. Sure, your experience with AWS might be underwhelming, and that's totally valid. But that doesn't matter if you still go ahead and choose to pay for their services. A market position isn't tied to the quality of service. It's tied to how much potential customers a business can sweep up and convert into hard revenue. The quality of the service is tangential to that. You can create an absolutely shoddy user experience, and still dominate a market if you happen to position yourself at the right time, with the right product to the right people.
j3th9n 6y ago
The problem here is that Amazon is infringing on copyright, using the "Elasticsearch" trademark and lying about a partnership in a tweet. > A license is a choice. It means you choose to not gain revenue by directly licensing the IP. Instead, you choose to put the code out there without any further legal obligations on your part as well as those who use that code. Open source doesn't mean you can infringe on its copyright and use trademarks everywhere you like. > It also means that you have to find alternate ways of making revenue e.g. by providing consultancy, building services or licensing the trademark (which is an entirely different ball game from open sourcing the code!). You didn't read the whole article?: "I took a personal loan to register the Elasticsearch trademark in 2011 believing in this norm in the open source ecosystem."
- spzb 6y ago
  You don't fix trademarks disputes by changing software licenses. Elastic appear to have a sound argument on the trademark front but to conflate that with changing the license of their product is disingenuous.
  - ethbr0 6y ago
    I read their argument as 'suing Amazon in the courts for trademark infringement is an insufficiently expedient remedy.' It does OSS no good if Elastic prevails on merits the day after they go out of business from lost revenue.
    - spzb 6y ago
      And what remedy do they have to a copyright license infringement? The same glacial pace legal system.
      - chippiewill 6y ago
        The damages and ramifications for violating software copyright are much clearer than the nuanced world of trademark infringement. The change in ElasticSearch license here is well publicised. If AWS were to continue to incorporate new changes to ElasticSearch it would be obvious they had deliberately violated the terms of the license and it's much easier to pursue a legal case.
dv_dt 6y ago
In a way it's hinting at the need for anti-trust barriers similar to how India barred Amazon from both running a product marketplace and offering it's own products in the same marketplace. I can see both sides of it though. If there are an anti-trust barrier between running AWS and offering major services on top of it, there would be a better overall segregation and likely more innovation overall. On the other hand, putting up a barrier there would be both complex and leaky, and cause missing out on sorts of efficiencies from close integration of cloud platform + services.
inssein 6y ago
Agreed. We actually were customers of Elastic's offering for a while, but they went down 3 times in a quarter, which was simply unacceptable. We had to switch, and have been okay since. Our bill is also more than half of what it used to be. The AWS implementation is quite limited in many ways, and there could be a point where we switch back or host it ourselves.
speeder 6y ago
I interviewed at Amazon, and researched their offerings to better prepare. Until reading this news, I never realized ElastiSearch wasn't an Amazon product, I always believed ElastiSearch was Amazon's invention, because of how Amazon employees talk about (always "Amazon ElastiSearch" phrase, often dropping the "service" part of it, so is easy to assume it is "Amazon's ElastiSearch" like "Microsoft Windows") So it is not just... "a few times too many", if I am interviewing for the company and got extremely confused, how other people wouldn't be confused too? And that is the whole point of trademark laws!
dang 6y ago
This subthread was originally a reply to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25834523 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25834523. We sometime prune these when they get too top-heavy aren't tightly semantically coupled.

StavrosK 6y ago

> The trouble is that Amazon simply out-competes ElasticSearch with their own product when it comes to consultancy, services, etc. I don't know if it out-competes them on those terms exactly, rather than the advantage of "Well I'm already on AWS and they offer an ES service so why not just use that".

spinningslate 6y ago
true - but that's exactly how it out-competes. It's a repeating pattern. Setting up an agreement with a 3rd party provider has friction. The bigger the client, the higher the friction. If $BIGCO has an enterprise agreement with $BIGCLOUD, then $SERVICE hosted on $BIGCLOUD is nearly always going to win against $SERVICE's own commercial offering.
- nicoburns 6y ago
  Right, but that's the sort of setup that's detrimental to society and therefore we ought to consider regulating or otherwise setting up an environment that is disadvantageous to it.
  - julienb_sea 6y ago
    Why do enterprises make it difficult to add a new vendor? Because they are careful with their data and legal obligations. Regulatory and auditing obligations are no joke and onboarding a new vendor is a nontrivial problem to do in a compliant fashion. The only aspect of this which is "detrimental to society" arguably is the legal requirements, but even then you might argue its better for a large organization to pay attention to other companies' licenses instead of stepping on them.
    - ethbr0 6y ago
      The key enabler here is IAM and data (at rest and moving). If we want to encourage free markets, the GDPR et al. need to be very careful to disincentivize "traffic within different parts of the same entity." As is, if my regulatory compliance is satisfied through AWS's data and IAM handling, then if an Amazon-hosted service better integrates with those components, it strictly dominates competition. That's a pretty unregulatable quality, and one easily optimized by Amazon (for itself), and impossibly by everyone else (on Amazon). This weaponizes data protection regulation into a moat around large everything-and-the-kitchen-sink I/PaaS providers. There needs to be balance between (a) protecting data & (b) ensuring a competitive ecosystem with multiple viable solutions.
    - nicoburns 6y ago
      The other way in which they are detrimental to society is by taking revenue away from companies such as elastic that are actually developing technology. In general there is economic hazard with any large company. There are also benefits and I don't think they should be eliminated entirely. But I do think they should be curtailed and the economy biased towards smaller companies.
    - 6y ago
ako 6y ago
Correct. Customers are looking for a cloud platform to run their apps, all the services are just features. Elastic is a feature, event bus is a feature, database is a feature, compute is a feature.
killingtime74 6y ago
Do you not think distribution is part of a product?

nrmitchi 6y ago

> Amazon simply out-competes ElasticSearch with their own product when it comes to consultancy, services You're kind of right about this, but it's the issue that AWS just has a massive head-start with any client that already uses AWS. They don't really out-compete, they just use their existing vendor lock-in to gain an advantage. And really, by using your dominance in one "market" to gain an advantage elsewhere ends up feeling like a bit of a grey area. > To add insult to injury, Amazon made the mistake of leveraging the ElasticSearch brand a few times too many in ways that just rub the ElasticSearch people the wrong way. You're phrasing this in a way like Amazon "leveraging the ElasticSearch brand" isn't a trademark issue. Is "leveraging the trademarks of another company" suddenly okay (as long as you don't do it 'a few times too many') as long as you're Amazon? What if Amazon started selling smart thermostats by "leveraging" the Nest brand?

ardy42 6y ago
> You're kind of right about this, but it's the issue that AWS just has a massive head-start with any client that already uses AWS. They don't really out-compete, they just use their existing vendor lock-in to gain an advantage. And really, by using your dominance in one "market" to gain an advantage elsewhere ends up feeling like a bit of a grey area. I'm not sure if it's actually a gray area, since I'm pretty sure leveraging your market dominance in one area to compete in another is illegal anti-competitive behavior. Isn't that what the whole Microsoft antitrust case was about? It's too bad the government pretty much gave up on enforcing antitrust law for 20 years, since it feels like similar practices became normalized due to lack of enforcement.
- notatoad 6y ago
  > leveraging your market dominance in one area to compete in another is illegal Leveraging your monopoly to compete in another area is illegal. Leveraging a strong position isn’t and Amazon is a long ways from a monopoly.
  - ardy42 6y ago
    > Leveraging your monopoly to compete in another area is illegal. Leveraging a strong position isn’t and Amazon is a long ways from a monopoly. That really depends on interpretation, which has shifted over time and continues to shift. IIRC, recent interpretations of some types of anti-competitive behavior have been rather literal and required something very close to a literal monopoly, which has had the effect of neutering antitrust law in all but the most blatant of cases. My understanding is that it's arguable that it's anti-competitive to leverage market share advantages more broadly (e.g. antitrust law could be used to constrain/break-up a duopoly).

rileymat2 6y ago

> The trouble isn't that Amazon decided to use ElasticSearch in their own offering. The trouble is that Amazon simply out-competes ElasticSearch with their own product when it comes to consultancy, services, etc. I kind of disagree here, the main reason it outcompetes is based on the network of linked self serve services in the ecosystem. We spend a ton of money on Amazon in general, and I would not tout thier consultancy as being anything but ok if not underwhelming.

CaptArmchair 6y ago
That's a fair point. > it outcompetes is based on the network of linked self serve services in the ecosystem You have to differentiate between business concerns. First, the concern of those who are willing to buy an IP license because they think the product is useful to them (akin to buying a Windows license key). ES doesn't make any revenue here. They don't sell IP licenses. That's a direct consequence of putting an open source license on your product. Anyone can just get a copy of the code and spin up their own instance, no strings attached. Second, the market of those who are looking towards assistance in using the product (consultancy, support, servicing, hosting,...). You can spin up your own instance and do all the work yourself independently. But for organizations, operating software is an expense: often it's cheaper to outsource those costs towards specialists... such as ES offering consultancy services. The product license and the type of support you want/need are different business concerns. You can choose to an open source product and host everything yourself, you can choose a closed source product and host it yourself, or you can outsource hosting and support to a partner like ES or AWS. > We spend a ton of money on Amazon in general, and I would not tout thier consultancy as being anything but ok if not underwhelming. Don't get me wrong here... But the moment you open up your wallet for AWS, you've already contributed to AWS' market position against ES. Sure, your experience with AWS might be underwhelming, and that's totally valid. But that doesn't matter if you still go ahead and choose to pay for their services. A market position isn't tied to the quality of service. It's tied to how much potential customers a business can sweep up and convert into hard revenue. The quality of the service is tangential to that. You can create an absolutely shoddy user experience, and still dominate a market if you happen to position yourself at the right time, with the right product to the right people.

j3th9n 6y ago

The problem here is that Amazon is infringing on copyright, using the "Elasticsearch" trademark and lying about a partnership in a tweet. > A license is a choice. It means you choose to not gain revenue by directly licensing the IP. Instead, you choose to put the code out there without any further legal obligations on your part as well as those who use that code. Open source doesn't mean you can infringe on its copyright and use trademarks everywhere you like. > It also means that you have to find alternate ways of making revenue e.g. by providing consultancy, building services or licensing the trademark (which is an entirely different ball game from open sourcing the code!). You didn't read the whole article?: "I took a personal loan to register the Elasticsearch trademark in 2011 believing in this norm in the open source ecosystem."

spzb 6y ago
You don't fix trademarks disputes by changing software licenses. Elastic appear to have a sound argument on the trademark front but to conflate that with changing the license of their product is disingenuous.
- ethbr0 6y ago
  I read their argument as 'suing Amazon in the courts for trademark infringement is an insufficiently expedient remedy.' It does OSS no good if Elastic prevails on merits the day after they go out of business from lost revenue.
  - spzb 6y ago
    And what remedy do they have to a copyright license infringement? The same glacial pace legal system.
    - chippiewill 6y ago
      The damages and ramifications for violating software copyright are much clearer than the nuanced world of trademark infringement. The change in ElasticSearch license here is well publicised. If AWS were to continue to incorporate new changes to ElasticSearch it would be obvious they had deliberately violated the terms of the license and it's much easier to pursue a legal case.

dv_dt 6y ago

In a way it's hinting at the need for anti-trust barriers similar to how India barred Amazon from both running a product marketplace and offering it's own products in the same marketplace. I can see both sides of it though. If there are an anti-trust barrier between running AWS and offering major services on top of it, there would be a better overall segregation and likely more innovation overall. On the other hand, putting up a barrier there would be both complex and leaky, and cause missing out on sorts of efficiencies from close integration of cloud platform + services.

inssein 6y ago

Agreed. We actually were customers of Elastic's offering for a while, but they went down 3 times in a quarter, which was simply unacceptable. We had to switch, and have been okay since. Our bill is also more than half of what it used to be. The AWS implementation is quite limited in many ways, and there could be a point where we switch back or host it ourselves.

speeder 6y ago

I interviewed at Amazon, and researched their offerings to better prepare. Until reading this news, I never realized ElastiSearch wasn't an Amazon product, I always believed ElastiSearch was Amazon's invention, because of how Amazon employees talk about (always "Amazon ElastiSearch" phrase, often dropping the "service" part of it, so is easy to assume it is "Amazon's ElastiSearch" like "Microsoft Windows") So it is not just... "a few times too many", if I am interviewing for the company and got extremely confused, how other people wouldn't be confused too? And that is the whole point of trademark laws!

dang 6y ago

This subthread was originally a reply to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25834523 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25834523. We sometime prune these when they get too top-heavy aren't tightly semantically coupled.