> "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.
It sounds like their whole issue was about confusion in the marketplace, though, and when someone does an oopsie that results in that kind of confusion, it may not be enough to take care of it quietly, on the side. So it seems now Elastic is making more noise, in an effort to clarify things more publicly.
>This just means their CTO was sloppy, Amazon legal department would have never allowed that tweet.
Surely the legal department would have issued some sort of retraction. Can you find it?
>Definitely an abuse of power by Amazon
Yeah, that's what we're saying.
>people were scared of using proprietary code without knowing...I'm not surprised they missed some as it was really hard to tell.
Amazon is a trillion dollar company that has every capability of doing their due diligence. Sloppy communication, abuse of trademarks and stealing proprietary code are all inexcusable behaviors by a company with the size and power that Amazon has.
You're describing the problem as if it were the excuse. Amazon abused their power, stole proprietary code, abused a trademark, and violated the culture of the open source community whose code they were leveraging for profit. There's no excuse for it, even if it was somehow legal - and I don't suspect it was. I suspect that Amazon knows it's not legal - they just figure they can get away with it.
> This just means their CTO was sloppy, Amazon legal department would have never allowed that tweet.
Sure, but we are not talking about "the intern tweeted something incorrect, gather your pitchforks until they delete it".
We are talking about a prolonged time span where AWS completely abused their massive size and market tower to basically do the legal and PR equivalent of laughing in the face of another company they were using and abusing. Details aside, that is a pretty grim view for the world of software, no?
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.