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The core of Elastic-search is Lucene, another OSS. I'm sure the ES team contributed a lot to Lucene, but do they share their profits with all the Lucene develop

The core of Elastic-search is Lucene, another OSS. I'm sure the ES team contributed a lot to Lucene, but do they share their profits with all the Lucene developers? You can think about Elastic as a hosted service around Lucene.

nrmitchi 6y ago
I've said this elsewhere, but no. There are two main differences here. 1. The scope of the change. My understanding is that Elasticsearch may use Lucene under the hood, but extends it in ways and for use cases that Lucene was not designed for. The same can not be said about AWS taking Elasticsearch and running it as a drop-in replacement. 2. Perhaps most importantly, Elasticsearch didn't build on top of Lucene, and then decide to call itself Lucene. If you think there is so little differentiation between the product you built and the product you built off of, that you are better off highjacking the name, then I question if you made any meaningful differences. 3rd BONUS difference: It is my understanding that a large part of the core Lucene team works at (or at one point worked at) Elastic[0]. [0] https://www.elastic.co/blog/investing-apache-lucene https://www.elastic.co/blog/investing-apache-lucene
- tinyhouse 6y ago
  1. No one says you need to modify/extend something in order to sell a service around it. That's why we have licenses that list exactly what you can do and cannot do with the software. 2. Amazon adds value here by providing hosting solutions for companies using the elastic search software. So it makes sense to call it "Amazon Elasticsearch Service" since that's what it is. I think interpreting this as Amazon built a new competing product but calling it the same name is not the right interpertation. If that's confusing then maybe modifying it to "amazon elasticsearch hosting service" would be the OK thing to do. Not sure if that would make Elastic happy. 3. That's nice of them (really!). Sounds like win-win. But again, it doesn't make anything they do more justifiable.
cmiles74 6y ago
The only obligation that Easticsearch has to the Lucene project is to donate back improvements to Lucene itself. I believe the Elasticsearch project has done this in the past. No one is asking Amazon to share profits with Elastic. Many people do expect Amazon to honor trademarks of other companies. Many people expect Amazon not to package proprietary features as if they were free and open source. Lucene is a library that makes it easier to provide indexing and searching of "stuff". It's not a commercial product with a sales and consulting team. I can't think of a more apples and oranges comparison.
- tinyhouse 6y ago
  I don't know anything about this story so cannot comment about them packaging proprietary features. But here's my thought about the trademarks claims from Elastic. The only info I have is the blog post they shared. Elasticsearch is a name of an open source project. Why is calling something "Amazon Elasticsearch Service" a trademark issue? It's not Amazon's fault they called their company after the name of an open source software (the OSS came first btw). Also, IMHO calling it "Amazon Elasticsearch Service" is fair since it represents exactly what it is. Would it better if they instead took the code, made some closed modifications and then released a service around it with a new name? My thought is no.
  - cmiles74 6y ago
    The open source project trademarked the name of the project. Because it is trademarked, Amazon requires permission to use the name of the project. This isn't unusual, many other open source projects trademarked the name of their project. Google has some guidance on why a project might want to do this. https://google.github.io/opencasebook/trademarks/#unmanaged-trademarks-naked-licensing https://google.github.io/opencasebook/trademarks/#unmanaged-... Here is a list of open source projects whose name is trademarked by Canonical. https://ubuntu.com/legal/trademarks https://ubuntu.com/legal/trademarks

nrmitchi 6y ago

I've said this elsewhere, but no. There are two main differences here. 1. The scope of the change. My understanding is that Elasticsearch may use Lucene under the hood, but extends it in ways and for use cases that Lucene was not designed for. The same can not be said about AWS taking Elasticsearch and running it as a drop-in replacement. 2. Perhaps most importantly, Elasticsearch didn't build on top of Lucene, and then decide to call itself Lucene. If you think there is so little differentiation between the product you built and the product you built off of, that you are better off highjacking the name, then I question if you made any meaningful differences. 3rd BONUS difference: It is my understanding that a large part of the core Lucene team works at (or at one point worked at) Elastic[0]. [0] https://www.elastic.co/blog/investing-apache-lucene https://www.elastic.co/blog/investing-apache-lucene

tinyhouse 6y ago
1. No one says you need to modify/extend something in order to sell a service around it. That's why we have licenses that list exactly what you can do and cannot do with the software. 2. Amazon adds value here by providing hosting solutions for companies using the elastic search software. So it makes sense to call it "Amazon Elasticsearch Service" since that's what it is. I think interpreting this as Amazon built a new competing product but calling it the same name is not the right interpertation. If that's confusing then maybe modifying it to "amazon elasticsearch hosting service" would be the OK thing to do. Not sure if that would make Elastic happy. 3. That's nice of them (really!). Sounds like win-win. But again, it doesn't make anything they do more justifiable.

cmiles74 6y ago

The only obligation that Easticsearch has to the Lucene project is to donate back improvements to Lucene itself. I believe the Elasticsearch project has done this in the past. No one is asking Amazon to share profits with Elastic. Many people do expect Amazon to honor trademarks of other companies. Many people expect Amazon not to package proprietary features as if they were free and open source. Lucene is a library that makes it easier to provide indexing and searching of "stuff". It's not a commercial product with a sales and consulting team. I can't think of a more apples and oranges comparison.

tinyhouse 6y ago
I don't know anything about this story so cannot comment about them packaging proprietary features. But here's my thought about the trademarks claims from Elastic. The only info I have is the blog post they shared. Elasticsearch is a name of an open source project. Why is calling something "Amazon Elasticsearch Service" a trademark issue? It's not Amazon's fault they called their company after the name of an open source software (the OSS came first btw). Also, IMHO calling it "Amazon Elasticsearch Service" is fair since it represents exactly what it is. Would it better if they instead took the code, made some closed modifications and then released a service around it with a new name? My thought is no.
- cmiles74 6y ago
  The open source project trademarked the name of the project. Because it is trademarked, Amazon requires permission to use the name of the project. This isn't unusual, many other open source projects trademarked the name of their project. Google has some guidance on why a project might want to do this. https://google.github.io/opencasebook/trademarks/#unmanaged-trademarks-naked-licensing https://google.github.io/opencasebook/trademarks/#unmanaged-... Here is a list of open source projects whose name is trademarked by Canonical. https://ubuntu.com/legal/trademarks https://ubuntu.com/legal/trademarks