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 defend 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., Pink Hat, JBoss, and different early open supply leaders relied on emblems to guard their investments). By 2015, nevertheless, Amazon CTO Werner Vogels was calling the launch of the “Amazon Elasticsearch service, an important 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, folks, or anything. For Elastic, it wasn’t about competitors, however fairly 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 line with Banon, “It’s a transparent trademark infringement, however no matter how a lot we tried, we had 1,000 legal professionals thrown at us.”
Fortuitous forks
This brings us to the OpenSearch fork. Many thought AWS forking Elasticsearch sounded the demise 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 dangerous for Elastic. Fairly the opposite. By forcing AWS to construct OpenSearch fairly than borrow Elasticsearch, Elastic gave itself room to renew its open supply methods. As Banon messaged me, “I personally all the time wished to get again to open supply, even once we modified the license. We had 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 an enormous sunk price for AWS,” he stated.