31 ms·

Elastic and Amazon reach agreement on trademark infringement lawsuit

226 points by dhd415 5y ago

WaxProlix 5y ago
I was sort of curious, so I went to see what impact this had on the customer experience at AWS. Searching for 'elasticsearch' in the AWS console services dropdown now yields: ''' Amazon OpenSearch Service (successor to Amazon Elasticsearch Service) Run and Scale OpenSearch and Elasticsearch Clusters (successor to Amazon Elasticsea... ''' This seems like a petty, small win from the Elasticsearch people. I understand AWS has a history of gobbling up OSS and productizing it, and that that's detrimental, but it's hard to see Elastic, Inc as anything but sore that they got their lunch eaten here. Maybe that's justified. But it comes off as incredibly petty. (disclaimer: i used to work at aws, but not anywhere near the referenced offerings).
- dhd415 5y ago
  Wow, it's pretty surprising to me that the agreement allowed AWS to refer to Elasticsearch at all when promoting their own managed search offering.
  - judge2020 5y ago
    There's a constant struggle between allowing free speech versus restricting it via trademark laws. In general, they want to make sure companies can talk about and mention their competitors by name and not be silenced by trademark lawsuits, while still ensuring the trademark isn't being infringed to the point of confusion. "Amazon Elasticsearch Service" sounds an awful lot like they have permission to use the Elasticsearch brand, while simply referring to it in parentheses indicates it's a competing service to the actual elasticsearch.
- sokoloff 5y ago
  It’s “detrimental” to companies who perhaps shouldn’t have chosen a license that allows AWS to do exactly what they did. Those companies can’t simultaneously claim to be competent and to have made that choice without knowing what they were doing. IMO, they chased the benefits of being open source and then changed course when the costs to them exceeded the benefits (which is fine for code going forward), but trademark concerns aside, I can’t see AWS as the bad actor here.
  - ignoramous 5y ago
    If anything AWS has increased its co-operation with F/OSS businesses of late and this clear shift in strategy was apparent in product / partnership announcements leading up to 2021 re:Invent. AWS, I believe, realise the F/OSS ecosystem mustn't be taken undue advantage of. I mean, AWS stands a good chance of getting caught in a vehement backlash (let alone sporadic bad PR) from the developer community, who ironically form the basis of an entire industry AWS sells into and operates in. With Microsoft + GitHub intensifying their investments in F/OSS, AWS had to play ball. It is smart, not petty on anyone's part. Judging from the tone of the article, I am glad Elastic is content in their current business relationship with AWS. Hopefully, the companies also find an agreement to have AWS' OpenSearch fork merged back in, as well. disclaimer: ex-AWS, but zero insider information.
    - pabs3 5y ago
      If the rumours here on HN are true they need to start working on giving back some of their internal patches too. I think they also need to start providing funding to FLOSS projects too, and doing something like Google Project Zero.
  - skrtskrt 5y ago
    This comment is in every thread about this, but there has to be a solution that satisfies FOSS purists as well as casual users without allowing a massive, evil megacorp to just stomp on every company built around open-source solutions.
    - Salgat 5y ago
      How is AWS stomping all over it? Being able to fork for your own needs is a good thing. You don't make something open source and accept the world's free contributions without acknowledging that.
      - skrtskrt 5y ago
        Again, you’re leading with the definition-of-FOSS argument. Step back from FOSS for a second. I think most people would agree that there’s somewhat of a moral issue with just taking someone else’s open source software and just hosting it and making billions, with nothing for the creators, because you are a megacorp who is good at hosting. Now, is there a way to solve that and have the benefits of FOSS? Both Mongo and MariaDB have tried to address this with licensing - MariaDB seems to have done this much less clumsily than Mongo, but both still had FOSS advocates shrieking --- EDIT to include response to below comments so everyone doesn't keep repeating the same things: > Either your product is fully free and you accept that people can fork it, even Amazon, or you choose a restrictive license. You can't make "free" (as in libre) compatible with "but". > I can totally see that you think this is unfair, but they did allow it and they were perfectly happy when being FOSS brought them market share. You have to take the good with the bad > If you have a moral qualm with bigcorps using your work for free, you don’t license in such a way that they can. Make your own license, or slap AGPL3 on it - either way, no bigcorp touches it. > But you cannot be mad when you say “I release this code under these terms” and AWS takes you up on your offer. If everyone stomps their feet and says "there's no solution, otherwise it's not OSS!" then the end result is only going to be a lot less open-source software. I'm not asking if someone who wrote code and chose an existing OSS license that allows any possible usage has any real recourse once they want to make money off of it - obviously not. I am asking, can we find a way to ensure software creators are compensated while still having the generally-recognized benefits of FOSS? > Don't you think there's a moral issue expecting free contributions to something which only you are allowed to monetize? Nowhere in OSS licenses does it include the expectations of free contributions > And how can you satisfy users to the greatest extent while also preventing them from using the provider that is best able to meet their needs? Again, can we just find a way for the creators to be compensated? I'd love for the OSS to be available as a hosted solution to be available on every cloud provider, including if the original creators choose to provide a cloud hosting. I'd also love for the original creators to be able to get some sliver of the money AWS/Google/Azure are making off of it. --- To me it seems like if you were to start a business around your open-source code right now, you would be smart to do one of these two things: 1. a MariaDB/CockroachDB BSL approach, where the newest versions are BSL, with a restriction that you can't provide a product where you just host our software without paying us, then all code automatically is fully open-source (GPL or whatever) after x amount of time, or x major version releases. - this comes with the danger of all the bad PR and gnashing of teeth that comes with non-pure-OSS licenses, or people just not adopting it because they dislike or don't understand the license 2. Open-Core with non-OSS-licensed Enterprise versions, and lean really hard into developing hosting and enterprise integrations to make sure you can make some money off the nonfree portions - this seems even more dangerous, that you have to be distracted on such things that are not the core product in order to defend against ending up like Docker, with everyone using it and no one paying you a dime.
- chrsig 5y ago
  From what I understand about trademark law, unlike copyright, trademarks must be defended at risk of losing them. So it may seem petty, but might actually have some necessity behind it. IANAL, and certainly not an expert on trademark law. Hopefully someone with more legal knowledge can provide some resources. Even if it is just petty, it's petty against amazon, and I for one don't really feel the need to have sympathy for them.
  - wumpus 5y ago
    Most people don't really get what trademark defense is -- having Amazon label the trademark in some places as "Elasticsearch is a trademark of <whoever>" is enough to count. Even linking the elasticsearch software repo or elastic.co in conjunction with the trademark name is enough. Source: I have a best-selling book author friend who has been defending her trademark on a somewhat popular pop-culture term this way for a few decades.
  - WaxProlix 5y ago
    That makes sense. I do sort of wish there were something to take away from this though that might lead to better outcomes for future endeavours, so that people could learn from Elastic's blunder, but if there's anything I don't see it.
- shitlord 5y ago
  This is kind of unrelated but "Amazon OpenSearch Service (successor to Amazon Elasticsearch Service)" is such a verbose product name. If you mark it as one of your favorite services in the AWS Console, it will take up a large chunk of the navigation bar (diminishing its purpose).
  - alwaysanon 5y ago
    You have to imagine at some point they are going to drop the (successor to Elasticsearch) part of it and this is temporary...
- ummonk 5y ago
  I don’t think it’s petty as such. Amazon’s naming was likely to cause confusion. This is a good win for Elastic to protect their trademark. Of course, Amazon has every legal and ethical right to continue providing their fork under a new name as they’re now doing. That’s the whole point of open source.
jbverschoor 5y ago
It would be nice if we can get some sort of standard license agreement for cases like this.. It’s such a shame that this happened
- deleted 5y ago
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uji 5y ago
Looks like pretty good news. Have worked in AWS before. So AWS is very famous for making money using open source products without contributing upstream. One very good example is Amazon redis. Amazon figured out that redis asynchronous replication didn't work at scale so instead of fixing issues upstream they chose to develop Amazon redis in house and monetized it. https://aws.amazon.com/memorydb/ https://aws.amazon.com/memorydb/ Enhanced version means patched made by AWS. https://aws.amazon.com/elasticache/redis-details/ https://aws.amazon.com/elasticache/redis-details/
- rabuse 5y ago
  Ahh, the new Oracle.
  - ignoramous 5y ago
    At this point in AWS' life, enterprise sales is king. Not surprising that there's shades of Oracle / Microsoft in them. May be, Google hired Oracle #2, Thomas Kurian, to head GCP for similar reasons. Like it or not, Oracle-sized shadow looms large over BigCloud.
    - LoveGracePeace 5y ago
      It surprises me when people lump Oracle (or AWS for that matter) in with the likes of Microsoft.
      - ghaff 5y ago
        Why? They're all enterprise software companies. They participate in open source to greater or lesser degrees. They seem absolutely part of the same category. This isn't either positive or negative commentary but just observation of what they do as businesses.
      - ipaddr 5y ago
        You are right Microsoft could be a more difficult entity to deal with.
sdesol 5y ago
Full disclosure: This is my tool that I'm using to generate the insights. When OpenSearch was announced, I shared some insights into how both Elasticsearch and OpenSearch were evolving, and I'll share some more up to date insights here. Looking at recent pull request activity, OpenSearch had 52 contributors https://oss.gitsense.com/insights/github?q=pull-age%3A%3C%3D120&t=crc-insights&tb=all&v=opensearch-project%2FOpenSearch%3A%3Agithub%3Aopensearch-project%2FOpenSearch%3A%3A%3A%3A https://oss.gitsense.com/insights/github?q=pull-age%3A%3C%3D... while Elasticsearch had 181 https://oss.gitsense.com/insights/github?q=pull-age%3A%3C%3D120&t=crc-insights&tb=all&v=elastic%2Felasticsearch%3A%3Agithub%3Aelastic%2Felasticsearch%3A%3A%3A%3A https://oss.gitsense.com/insights/github?q=pull-age%3A%3C%3D... The metric that I'm most interested in, is knowing how many people committed within the last 14 days compared to those that committed more than 14 days ago. For Elasticsearch, they had 87 contributors which accounts for 68% of all contributors. OpenSearch had 20, which accounts for 67%. With these numbers, I can ball park how many people are working on Elasticsearch and OpenSearch full time and I would say Elasticsearch at the present moment has probably 5 times more people working on it fulltime vs OpenSearch. An important thing to note is, Amazon has other projects that are related to OpenSearch so these numbers don't necessary give the full picture, but it is pretty obvious that Elasticsearch is evolving at a much faster pace and time will tell if they (OpenSearch) can keep up.
- TSiege 5y ago
  I'll be curious to see what happens as well. I ended up going with Opensearch since I use AWS. I figured I'm already locked in to that environment anyways, so why not
  - sdesol 5y ago
    Somebody that does consulting work with Elasticsearch mentioned that they had some pretty innovative features in the pipeline and these are the things that can really pull people away from OpenSearch. It could also be that, people only really want basic search functionality so who knows right :-)
    - 5y ago
baobabKoodaa 5y ago
This announcement is confusing, because it makes no mention of OpenSearch. The announcement implies that OpenSearch should no longer be available on AWS, but (of course) it is.
- sdesol 5y ago
  It was announced by elastic and I'm not sure it is in their best interest to advertise their competitor.
- resoluteteeth 5y ago
  Yes it is intentionally misleading about that
deknos 5y ago
What does this mean for opensearch?
- wmf 5y ago
  AWS is now all-in on OpenSearch.
- resoluteteeth 5y ago
  Nothing. This is purely about use of the name "Elasticsearch" so Amazon just has to be more careful to only use the name "OpenSearch"
rmccue 5y ago
Hopefully this will let each of them compete on their own merits. I’ve been tossing up moving our workloads to Elastic Cloud anyway, because AWS ES Service is a source of constant headaches for us. Feels like at least once a week a server ends up in a state where we can’t fix it, and AWS engineers have to manually fix their internal state. Their standard response is “add more nodes”; well, we did that, and it is costing us an arm and a leg, and it didn’t fix the problems. (Plus, now we have new problems where networking blips appear to be causing quorum problems and sending the cluster into a death spiral.) Purely off the customer experience, it feels like Elastic Cloud has to be better; the whole licensing debacle has definitely turned me off Elastic though.
- clambordan 5y ago
  We had similarly terrible experiences with AWS ES, so we moved to self-hosted Elastic. It's better but still pricey and requires more manhours dedicated to tuning. Their move away from open-source has been unfortunate. For that and some other reasons we've ended up more impressed with Logz.io and Splunk SaaS.
  - taf2 5y ago
    What kind of tuning do you do? We spend time but typically on upgrades… very rarely have we spent much time on tuning I’m curious what kind of tuning are people doing beyond mlock and having enough memory / nodes?
  - gcbirzan 5y ago
    I mean, logz.io is okay and all, but it's quite expensive, and has a loooot of outages. I don't remember a week where we didn't have issues, the most common being log ingestion lag, which take hours to fix. That, and their API is bad: you can only query over a 2 day period and their API keys allow full control over everything.
- arecurrence 5y ago
  I also had a serious problem with AWS Managed ES. In my case, some of the heap didn't free on every garbage collect which would eventually result in cluster failure. This was likely a JVM misconfiguration and was most easily observed by viewing a shrinking sawtooth pattern on the memory graphs. This resulted in a multi day marathon of sleeplessness keeping the cluster alive by continually rolling it every few hours (We initially assumed we had done something wrong and investigated ourselves first... eventually I shunted traffic to both my own cluster and the managed cluster... my cluster did free heap as expected and we successfully switched over without downtime but wow was it ever hairy during high traffic periods). We saved a bunch of money and gained performance by using our own cluster. That cluster hasn't gone down since... years later. It's very difficult to debug these problems when you don't have direct access to elastic search's configuration... what would normally take minutes to verify can take hours to isolate.
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StopHammoTime 5y ago
Honesty sounds like AWS is giving up on providing hosted elastic search. I hated using it, it always was failing and I spent more time administering it than anything else. I recently used Elastic Cloud, and as much as I hate the company, their product is actually really good. I’d always recommend Elastic.
- dragonwriter 5y ago
  > Honesty sounds like AWS is giving up on providing hosted elastic search. Yes, Elastic’s press release is carefully crafted to give that impression, but, AFAICT, all AWS is doing is using the name of the open fork (“OpenSearch” [0]) for their service, which is now labelled “Amazon OpenSearch Service” and subheaded “(successor to Amazon Elasticsearch Service)” [1], and not using the ElasticSearch name (except as a historical reference.) [0] https://opensearch.org/ https://opensearch.org/ [1] https://aws.amazon.com/opensearch-service/ https://aws.amazon.com/opensearch-service/
temuze 5y ago
The fact that their main product is "Elastic Cloud" and AWS EC2 means "Elastic Compute Cloud" is... unfortunate
- Macha 5y ago
  In this case, EC2 precedes Elastic Inc. by 6 years and Elastic Cloud by 9, so can't blame Amazon for that one.
nijave 5y ago
AWS has gobs of open source software. I think they open source everything that runs client side (all the agents and integrations for EC2 for instance). It's pretty disingenuous to say they don't open source. Based off experience with AWS and GCP, AWS has significantly more widely available. On the other hand, Google the company has contributed a lot to OSS (like cgroups in the Linux kernel)
pabs3 5y ago
What is the AWS fork called again?
- deznu 5y ago
  OpenSearch
stevefan1999 5y ago
For anyone who wanted out of this fiasco, checkout MeiliSearch: https://docs.meilisearch.com/ https://docs.meilisearch.com/ It's written in asynchronous Rust with native application speed albeit using much lower memory usage than ElasticSearch, and comes with even more features than ES, so it's feature-rich, blazing fast and can still benefit on multithreaded CPUs. Downside is that it does not have distributed indexing mode yet, but it is scheduled on this year (presumably Q4 2022 I guess)
- ramoz 5y ago
  Milisearch is cool, but not a solution for “anyone” working on complex & large scale search.
- jillesvangurp 5y ago
  I'm sure it is fine and has interesting features. But at first glance it's objectively a tiny subset of the features that either Elasticsearch or Opensearch has. If that solves your problem; great. But if you need a good all round solution for search I would not start with this. The low end of the market is well covered with solutions that don't really offer a lot of features, are a bit challenged on the scalability front, lack usability, etc. Some of those have more merit than others of course than others. Things are not automatically better when they are half implemented in Rust. Lucene is an amazing piece of technology that over the years has resisted multiple attempts for people to do better in other languages. Contrary to the popular belief, it's actually pretty good with memory. Most of it is off heap memory or operating system file caches these days: it relies on memory mapped files for a lot of things. It's also pretty good with doing things concurrently. E.g. updating index files with 32 CPU cores while also serving queries is not an easy problem to solve. I've indexed documents at a rate of 500M/second on a 30 node cluster once. That's pretty amazing to see happening. I was basically saturating IO and CPUs. Indexed over a billion documents in about 1 hour. Lucene has many issues; scaling isn't one of them.
ummonk 5y ago
What is the Amazon fork being called now? Edit: I see it’s called OpenSearch now.
DonHopkins 5y ago
Super Elastic Dot-Com Bubble Plastic! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super_Elastic_Bubble_Plastic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super_Elastic_Bubble_Plastic https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8pErbVm-LGI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8pErbVm-LGI
josephcsible 5y ago
Reminder that Amazon is the good guy and Elastic is the bad guy here. Elastic changed their license from a FOSS one to a proprietary one, and Amazon's fork is a FOSS continuation of the last version before the change. Yes, Amazon is evil in a lot of ways, but there's nothing even remotely evil about what they did here. And yes, Elastic had a legitimate problem that their old license was open to abuse, but the right way to fix that is the AGPL, not going full proprietary.
Otek 5y ago
So what does it mean? We will have on AWS OpenSearch and ElasticSearch or still just OpenSearch?

226 points by dhd415 5y ago

I was sort of curious, so I went to see what impact this had on the customer experience at AWS. Searching for 'elasticsearch' in the AWS console services dropdown now yields: ''' Amazon OpenSearch Service (successor to Amazon Elasticsearch Service) Run and Scale OpenSearch and Elasticsearch Clusters (successor to Amazon Elasticsea... ''' This seems like a petty, small win from the Elasticsearch people. I understand AWS has a history of gobbling up OSS and productizing it, and that that's detrimental, but it's hard to see Elastic, Inc as anything but sore that they got their lunch eaten here. Maybe that's justified. But it comes off as incredibly petty. (disclaimer: i used to work at aws, but not anywhere near the referenced offerings).

dhd415 5y ago
Wow, it's pretty surprising to me that the agreement allowed AWS to refer to Elasticsearch at all when promoting their own managed search offering.
- judge2020 5y ago
  There's a constant struggle between allowing free speech versus restricting it via trademark laws. In general, they want to make sure companies can talk about and mention their competitors by name and not be silenced by trademark lawsuits, while still ensuring the trademark isn't being infringed to the point of confusion. "Amazon Elasticsearch Service" sounds an awful lot like they have permission to use the Elasticsearch brand, while simply referring to it in parentheses indicates it's a competing service to the actual elasticsearch.
sokoloff 5y ago
It’s “detrimental” to companies who perhaps shouldn’t have chosen a license that allows AWS to do exactly what they did. Those companies can’t simultaneously claim to be competent and to have made that choice without knowing what they were doing. IMO, they chased the benefits of being open source and then changed course when the costs to them exceeded the benefits (which is fine for code going forward), but trademark concerns aside, I can’t see AWS as the bad actor here.
- ignoramous 5y ago
  If anything AWS has increased its co-operation with F/OSS businesses of late and this clear shift in strategy was apparent in product / partnership announcements leading up to 2021 re:Invent. AWS, I believe, realise the F/OSS ecosystem mustn't be taken undue advantage of. I mean, AWS stands a good chance of getting caught in a vehement backlash (let alone sporadic bad PR) from the developer community, who ironically form the basis of an entire industry AWS sells into and operates in. With Microsoft + GitHub intensifying their investments in F/OSS, AWS had to play ball. It is smart, not petty on anyone's part. Judging from the tone of the article, I am glad Elastic is content in their current business relationship with AWS. Hopefully, the companies also find an agreement to have AWS' OpenSearch fork merged back in, as well. disclaimer: ex-AWS, but zero insider information.
  - pabs3 5y ago
    If the rumours here on HN are true they need to start working on giving back some of their internal patches too. I think they also need to start providing funding to FLOSS projects too, and doing something like Google Project Zero.
- skrtskrt 5y ago
  This comment is in every thread about this, but there has to be a solution that satisfies FOSS purists as well as casual users without allowing a massive, evil megacorp to just stomp on every company built around open-source solutions.
  - Salgat 5y ago
    How is AWS stomping all over it? Being able to fork for your own needs is a good thing. You don't make something open source and accept the world's free contributions without acknowledging that.
    - skrtskrt 5y ago
      Again, you’re leading with the definition-of-FOSS argument. Step back from FOSS for a second. I think most people would agree that there’s somewhat of a moral issue with just taking someone else’s open source software and just hosting it and making billions, with nothing for the creators, because you are a megacorp who is good at hosting. Now, is there a way to solve that and have the benefits of FOSS? Both Mongo and MariaDB have tried to address this with licensing - MariaDB seems to have done this much less clumsily than Mongo, but both still had FOSS advocates shrieking --- EDIT to include response to below comments so everyone doesn't keep repeating the same things: > Either your product is fully free and you accept that people can fork it, even Amazon, or you choose a restrictive license. You can't make "free" (as in libre) compatible with "but". > I can totally see that you think this is unfair, but they did allow it and they were perfectly happy when being FOSS brought them market share. You have to take the good with the bad > If you have a moral qualm with bigcorps using your work for free, you don’t license in such a way that they can. Make your own license, or slap AGPL3 on it - either way, no bigcorp touches it. > But you cannot be mad when you say “I release this code under these terms” and AWS takes you up on your offer. If everyone stomps their feet and says "there's no solution, otherwise it's not OSS!" then the end result is only going to be a lot less open-source software. I'm not asking if someone who wrote code and chose an existing OSS license that allows any possible usage has any real recourse once they want to make money off of it - obviously not. I am asking, can we find a way to ensure software creators are compensated while still having the generally-recognized benefits of FOSS? > Don't you think there's a moral issue expecting free contributions to something which only you are allowed to monetize? Nowhere in OSS licenses does it include the expectations of free contributions > And how can you satisfy users to the greatest extent while also preventing them from using the provider that is best able to meet their needs? Again, can we just find a way for the creators to be compensated? I'd love for the OSS to be available as a hosted solution to be available on every cloud provider, including if the original creators choose to provide a cloud hosting. I'd also love for the original creators to be able to get some sliver of the money AWS/Google/Azure are making off of it. --- To me it seems like if you were to start a business around your open-source code right now, you would be smart to do one of these two things: 1. a MariaDB/CockroachDB BSL approach, where the newest versions are BSL, with a restriction that you can't provide a product where you just host our software without paying us, then all code automatically is fully open-source (GPL or whatever) after x amount of time, or x major version releases. - this comes with the danger of all the bad PR and gnashing of teeth that comes with non-pure-OSS licenses, or people just not adopting it because they dislike or don't understand the license 2. Open-Core with non-OSS-licensed Enterprise versions, and lean really hard into developing hosting and enterprise integrations to make sure you can make some money off the nonfree portions - this seems even more dangerous, that you have to be distracted on such things that are not the core product in order to defend against ending up like Docker, with everyone using it and no one paying you a dime.
chrsig 5y ago
From what I understand about trademark law, unlike copyright, trademarks must be defended at risk of losing them. So it may seem petty, but might actually have some necessity behind it. IANAL, and certainly not an expert on trademark law. Hopefully someone with more legal knowledge can provide some resources. Even if it is just petty, it's petty against amazon, and I for one don't really feel the need to have sympathy for them.
- wumpus 5y ago
  Most people don't really get what trademark defense is -- having Amazon label the trademark in some places as "Elasticsearch is a trademark of <whoever>" is enough to count. Even linking the elasticsearch software repo or elastic.co in conjunction with the trademark name is enough. Source: I have a best-selling book author friend who has been defending her trademark on a somewhat popular pop-culture term this way for a few decades.
- WaxProlix 5y ago
  That makes sense. I do sort of wish there were something to take away from this though that might lead to better outcomes for future endeavours, so that people could learn from Elastic's blunder, but if there's anything I don't see it.
shitlord 5y ago
This is kind of unrelated but "Amazon OpenSearch Service (successor to Amazon Elasticsearch Service)" is such a verbose product name. If you mark it as one of your favorite services in the AWS Console, it will take up a large chunk of the navigation bar (diminishing its purpose).
- alwaysanon 5y ago
  You have to imagine at some point they are going to drop the (successor to Elasticsearch) part of it and this is temporary...
ummonk 5y ago
I don’t think it’s petty as such. Amazon’s naming was likely to cause confusion. This is a good win for Elastic to protect their trademark. Of course, Amazon has every legal and ethical right to continue providing their fork under a new name as they’re now doing. That’s the whole point of open source.

jbverschoor 5y ago

It would be nice if we can get some sort of standard license agreement for cases like this.. It’s such a shame that this happened

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uji 5y ago

Looks like pretty good news. Have worked in AWS before. So AWS is very famous for making money using open source products without contributing upstream. One very good example is Amazon redis. Amazon figured out that redis asynchronous replication didn't work at scale so instead of fixing issues upstream they chose to develop Amazon redis in house and monetized it. https://aws.amazon.com/memorydb/ https://aws.amazon.com/memorydb/ Enhanced version means patched made by AWS. https://aws.amazon.com/elasticache/redis-details/ https://aws.amazon.com/elasticache/redis-details/

rabuse 5y ago
Ahh, the new Oracle.
- ignoramous 5y ago
  At this point in AWS' life, enterprise sales is king. Not surprising that there's shades of Oracle / Microsoft in them. May be, Google hired Oracle #2, Thomas Kurian, to head GCP for similar reasons. Like it or not, Oracle-sized shadow looms large over BigCloud.
  - LoveGracePeace 5y ago
    It surprises me when people lump Oracle (or AWS for that matter) in with the likes of Microsoft.
    - ghaff 5y ago
      Why? They're all enterprise software companies. They participate in open source to greater or lesser degrees. They seem absolutely part of the same category. This isn't either positive or negative commentary but just observation of what they do as businesses.
    - ipaddr 5y ago
      You are right Microsoft could be a more difficult entity to deal with.

sdesol 5y ago

Full disclosure: This is my tool that I'm using to generate the insights. When OpenSearch was announced, I shared some insights into how both Elasticsearch and OpenSearch were evolving, and I'll share some more up to date insights here. Looking at recent pull request activity, OpenSearch had 52 contributors https://oss.gitsense.com/insights/github?q=pull-age%3A%3C%3D120&t=crc-insights&tb=all&v=opensearch-project%2FOpenSearch%3A%3Agithub%3Aopensearch-project%2FOpenSearch%3A%3A%3A%3A https://oss.gitsense.com/insights/github?q=pull-age%3A%3C%3D... while Elasticsearch had 181 https://oss.gitsense.com/insights/github?q=pull-age%3A%3C%3D120&t=crc-insights&tb=all&v=elastic%2Felasticsearch%3A%3Agithub%3Aelastic%2Felasticsearch%3A%3A%3A%3A https://oss.gitsense.com/insights/github?q=pull-age%3A%3C%3D... The metric that I'm most interested in, is knowing how many people committed within the last 14 days compared to those that committed more than 14 days ago. For Elasticsearch, they had 87 contributors which accounts for 68% of all contributors. OpenSearch had 20, which accounts for 67%. With these numbers, I can ball park how many people are working on Elasticsearch and OpenSearch full time and I would say Elasticsearch at the present moment has probably 5 times more people working on it fulltime vs OpenSearch. An important thing to note is, Amazon has other projects that are related to OpenSearch so these numbers don't necessary give the full picture, but it is pretty obvious that Elasticsearch is evolving at a much faster pace and time will tell if they (OpenSearch) can keep up.

TSiege 5y ago
I'll be curious to see what happens as well. I ended up going with Opensearch since I use AWS. I figured I'm already locked in to that environment anyways, so why not
- sdesol 5y ago
  Somebody that does consulting work with Elasticsearch mentioned that they had some pretty innovative features in the pipeline and these are the things that can really pull people away from OpenSearch. It could also be that, people only really want basic search functionality so who knows right :-)
  - 5y ago

baobabKoodaa 5y ago

This announcement is confusing, because it makes no mention of OpenSearch. The announcement implies that OpenSearch should no longer be available on AWS, but (of course) it is.

sdesol 5y ago
It was announced by elastic and I'm not sure it is in their best interest to advertise their competitor.
resoluteteeth 5y ago
Yes it is intentionally misleading about that

deknos 5y ago

What does this mean for opensearch?

wmf 5y ago
AWS is now all-in on OpenSearch.
resoluteteeth 5y ago
Nothing. This is purely about use of the name "Elasticsearch" so Amazon just has to be more careful to only use the name "OpenSearch"

rmccue 5y ago

Hopefully this will let each of them compete on their own merits. I’ve been tossing up moving our workloads to Elastic Cloud anyway, because AWS ES Service is a source of constant headaches for us. Feels like at least once a week a server ends up in a state where we can’t fix it, and AWS engineers have to manually fix their internal state. Their standard response is “add more nodes”; well, we did that, and it is costing us an arm and a leg, and it didn’t fix the problems. (Plus, now we have new problems where networking blips appear to be causing quorum problems and sending the cluster into a death spiral.) Purely off the customer experience, it feels like Elastic Cloud has to be better; the whole licensing debacle has definitely turned me off Elastic though.

clambordan 5y ago
We had similarly terrible experiences with AWS ES, so we moved to self-hosted Elastic. It's better but still pricey and requires more manhours dedicated to tuning. Their move away from open-source has been unfortunate. For that and some other reasons we've ended up more impressed with Logz.io and Splunk SaaS.
- taf2 5y ago
  What kind of tuning do you do? We spend time but typically on upgrades… very rarely have we spent much time on tuning I’m curious what kind of tuning are people doing beyond mlock and having enough memory / nodes?
- gcbirzan 5y ago
  I mean, logz.io is okay and all, but it's quite expensive, and has a loooot of outages. I don't remember a week where we didn't have issues, the most common being log ingestion lag, which take hours to fix. That, and their API is bad: you can only query over a 2 day period and their API keys allow full control over everything.
arecurrence 5y ago
I also had a serious problem with AWS Managed ES. In my case, some of the heap didn't free on every garbage collect which would eventually result in cluster failure. This was likely a JVM misconfiguration and was most easily observed by viewing a shrinking sawtooth pattern on the memory graphs. This resulted in a multi day marathon of sleeplessness keeping the cluster alive by continually rolling it every few hours (We initially assumed we had done something wrong and investigated ourselves first... eventually I shunted traffic to both my own cluster and the managed cluster... my cluster did free heap as expected and we successfully switched over without downtime but wow was it ever hairy during high traffic periods). We saved a bunch of money and gained performance by using our own cluster. That cluster hasn't gone down since... years later. It's very difficult to debug these problems when you don't have direct access to elastic search's configuration... what would normally take minutes to verify can take hours to isolate.

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StopHammoTime 5y ago

Honesty sounds like AWS is giving up on providing hosted elastic search. I hated using it, it always was failing and I spent more time administering it than anything else. I recently used Elastic Cloud, and as much as I hate the company, their product is actually really good. I’d always recommend Elastic.

dragonwriter 5y ago
> Honesty sounds like AWS is giving up on providing hosted elastic search. Yes, Elastic’s press release is carefully crafted to give that impression, but, AFAICT, all AWS is doing is using the name of the open fork (“OpenSearch” [0]) for their service, which is now labelled “Amazon OpenSearch Service” and subheaded “(successor to Amazon Elasticsearch Service)” [1], and not using the ElasticSearch name (except as a historical reference.) [0] https://opensearch.org/ https://opensearch.org/ [1] https://aws.amazon.com/opensearch-service/ https://aws.amazon.com/opensearch-service/

temuze 5y ago

The fact that their main product is "Elastic Cloud" and AWS EC2 means "Elastic Compute Cloud" is... unfortunate

Macha 5y ago
In this case, EC2 precedes Elastic Inc. by 6 years and Elastic Cloud by 9, so can't blame Amazon for that one.

nijave 5y ago

AWS has gobs of open source software. I think they open source everything that runs client side (all the agents and integrations for EC2 for instance). It's pretty disingenuous to say they don't open source. Based off experience with AWS and GCP, AWS has significantly more widely available. On the other hand, Google the company has contributed a lot to OSS (like cgroups in the Linux kernel)

pabs3 5y ago

What is the AWS fork called again?

deznu 5y ago
OpenSearch

stevefan1999 5y ago

For anyone who wanted out of this fiasco, checkout MeiliSearch: https://docs.meilisearch.com/ https://docs.meilisearch.com/ It's written in asynchronous Rust with native application speed albeit using much lower memory usage than ElasticSearch, and comes with even more features than ES, so it's feature-rich, blazing fast and can still benefit on multithreaded CPUs. Downside is that it does not have distributed indexing mode yet, but it is scheduled on this year (presumably Q4 2022 I guess)

ramoz 5y ago
Milisearch is cool, but not a solution for “anyone” working on complex & large scale search.
jillesvangurp 5y ago
I'm sure it is fine and has interesting features. But at first glance it's objectively a tiny subset of the features that either Elasticsearch or Opensearch has. If that solves your problem; great. But if you need a good all round solution for search I would not start with this. The low end of the market is well covered with solutions that don't really offer a lot of features, are a bit challenged on the scalability front, lack usability, etc. Some of those have more merit than others of course than others. Things are not automatically better when they are half implemented in Rust. Lucene is an amazing piece of technology that over the years has resisted multiple attempts for people to do better in other languages. Contrary to the popular belief, it's actually pretty good with memory. Most of it is off heap memory or operating system file caches these days: it relies on memory mapped files for a lot of things. It's also pretty good with doing things concurrently. E.g. updating index files with 32 CPU cores while also serving queries is not an easy problem to solve. I've indexed documents at a rate of 500M/second on a 30 node cluster once. That's pretty amazing to see happening. I was basically saturating IO and CPUs. Indexed over a billion documents in about 1 hour. Lucene has many issues; scaling isn't one of them.

ummonk 5y ago

What is the Amazon fork being called now? Edit: I see it’s called OpenSearch now.

DonHopkins 5y ago

Super Elastic Dot-Com Bubble Plastic! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super_Elastic_Bubble_Plastic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super_Elastic_Bubble_Plastic https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8pErbVm-LGI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8pErbVm-LGI

josephcsible 5y ago

Reminder that Amazon is the good guy and Elastic is the bad guy here. Elastic changed their license from a FOSS one to a proprietary one, and Amazon's fork is a FOSS continuation of the last version before the change. Yes, Amazon is evil in a lot of ways, but there's nothing even remotely evil about what they did here. And yes, Elastic had a legitimate problem that their old license was open to abuse, but the right way to fix that is the AGPL, not going full proprietary.

Otek 5y ago

So what does it mean? We will have on AWS OpenSearch and ElasticSearch or still just OpenSearch?