Take Banon, who based Elastic and earlier than that created the Elasticsearch undertaking in 2010. As he tells it, he took out loans to trademark Elasticsearch to attempt to shield his work. This wasn’t the work of a rapacious open supply company overlord. It was a developer attempting to play by the open supply guidelines (i.e., Purple Hat, JBoss, and different early open supply leaders relied on logos to guard their investments). By 2015, nonetheless, Amazon CTO Werner Vogels was calling the launch of the “Amazon Elasticsearch service, an ideal partnership between Elastic and AWS.”
Besides it wasn’t. There was no partnership. There was nothing however AWS taking Elasticsearch and promoting it as its personal, with no contributions of money, code, individuals, or the rest. For Elastic, it wasn’t about competitors, however moderately the best way AWS bought the trademarked product. As Banon notes, “The issue was by no means AWS taking Elasticsearch and offering it, it was calling it AWS Elasticsearch and implying that it’s their service (together with stating it explicitly).” In response to Banon, “It’s a transparent trademark infringement, however no matter how a lot we tried, we had 1,000 attorneys thrown at us.”
Fortuitous forks
This brings us to the OpenSearch fork. Many thought AWS forking Elasticsearch sounded the loss of life knell for Elastic. Nope. As I famous again in 2021, pretty much as good as OpenSearch could also be for AWS, it hasn’t been unhealthy for Elastic. Fairly the opposite. By forcing AWS to construct OpenSearch moderately than borrow Elasticsearch, Elastic gave itself room to renew its open supply methods. As Banon messaged me, “I personally all the time needed to get again to open supply, even after we modified the license. We have been hoping AWS would fork and would allow us to transfer again when sufficient time has handed.” It was a calculated danger that seems to be paying off: “We simply really feel we are able to safely do it now that the fork has occurred and it’s a giant sunk price for AWS,” he mentioned.
