It's worth noting that MongoDB made the same change to their licensing due to a similar move by AWS 2 years ago... it made them a stronger business though (and enabled them to create even more value for their current/future customers).
Typically the standard for trademark cases is whether or not customers will confuse the two competing names/products/brands.
It's quite possible that because both companies target developers, architects, etc who're more than able to distinguish between the two companies' offerings... that Elastic's lawsuits didn't go anywhere
Sophisticated Users are definitely one factor that weight in favor of developers, but in my view it’s outweighed by the degree of similarity of the two marks, the similarity of the services, the uniqueness of Elastic as a mark, evidence of actual confusion (before reading Elastic’s complaint, I was confused by the names, and I’ve been involved in making decisions about the use of these kinds of services.)
For anyone super interested in this topic (and the potential ramifications for Big Tech and society), Tim Hwang (former global public policy lead for artificial intelligence and machine learning at Google) wrote a wonderfully in-depth book about this. See the link below:
https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374538651
As someone who’s worked with the Marketing Dept. a lot in my prior role, the reason e-commerce sites (and possibly Reddit) do the things you mentioned is because they’re overly focused on new user/customer acquisition vs keeping current customers/users who know the the products’ value happy.
There’s almost always a bit of political drama behind the decision too: Marketing gets to say that they’re acquiring new users in short term (thereby increasing their budget and clout in the Org) while destroying customer value in the long run
Earth's resources are strained, yes. However, taxing billionaires as you propose wouldn't necessarily pay for all the entitlement spending that the elderly require.
A solution to both of these problems is increasing total factor productivity (aka doing more with less). The big rise in living standards during the post-war boom was largely a result of a huge increase in total factor productivity.
This has petered out since the 1970s and a lot of the 'zero-sum' mentality/nostalgia for a 'Great America'/fighting over a fixed economic pie in the US today is because we haven't been increasing productivity (i.e. there hasn't been enough technological innovation and disruption) at a fast enough rate.
I don't think Earth's resources are strained. I think we're approaching capacity, especially in the oil industry, but so much of the food we produce is thrown away.
Ironically (given our current Zeitgeist) by the time we start to feel the effects of the these demographic trends, we'll need more automation to keep up productivity (and therefore long-term GDP growth)... especially when one considers the entitlement spending that will be needed to care for the elderly).
I'd imagine that by then, there will be more individuals advocating for increased automation and (hopefully) society will become increasingly 'techno-optimist' as a result
More info at the link below
https://stratechery.com/2019/aws-mongodb-and-the-economic-re...