The author Shay ms Banon

We recently announced a licensing change, see blog, FAQ for details. This morning we released some additional guidance on licensing changes. I want to share with you a few more reasons why we wanted to change the license agreement.

This was a very difficult decision to make, especially given my background and personal experience in open source. I take our responsibilities very seriously. To be clear, in all likelihood this change will have no impact on you (our users), nor will it have any impact on our customers deployed in the cloud or on-premises. I hope the purpose of this change is very clear.

So why change the license agreement? AWS and Amazon Elasticsearch Service. They have been doing something since 2015 that we find completely unacceptable and it’s only going to get worse. As a successful company and market leader, if we don’t stand up to them now, who will?

The purpose of our licensing changes is to prevent many companies from using our Elasticsearch and Kibana products without working with us and making them available directly as a service.

Over the years, we were fed up with Amazon/AWS misleading and confusing the community, so we decided to change the license agreement.

We tried every avenue possible, including the courts, but in light of AWS ‘unrepentant behavior, we decided to change our license agreement so that we could focus on product development and innovation rather than endless litigation.

AWS ‘actions have forced us to take this step, and we do not take it lightly. If they hadn’t, we wouldn’t be having this discussion today.

We believe that Amazon’s actions are inconsistent with the core norms and values of the open source ecosystem. We want to have a presence in the market and use that influence to counter this so that others don’t face the same problems in the future.

In the open source world, trademarks are considered an important and positive way to protect a product’s reputation. Trademarks are widely used and enforced. From small projects to foundations like Apache to companies like RedHat, the entire open source community considers trademarks sacrosanct. So imagine our surprise when Amazon launched a Elasticsearch Service in 2015 called Amazon Elasticsearch Service. We think this is very clear trademark infringement. This is totally unacceptable!

In 2011, I registered Elasticsearch as a trademark through a personal loan, believing in this specification in the open source ecosystem. It pains me to see trademarks being so blatantly abused. We tried to communicate with Amazon to resolve this problem, but repeated attempts failed, forcing us to file a lawsuit. Totally unacceptable!

We’ve seen this trademark issue create confusion for customers who think Amazon Elasticsearch Service is actually a Service that works with Elastic with our permission and collaboration. But that’s not the case. This is totally unacceptable!

You can imagine how surprised we were when Amazon’s CTO tweeted that the service was launched in partnership with us. We didn’t actually put it out together. We have heard this obfuscation again and again over the years. This is totally unacceptable!

 

When Amazon announced their Open Distro for Elasticsearch branch, they used code that we believe was copied from our commercial code by a third party and made available as part of the Open Distro project. We believe this further divides our community and creates more chaos.

For more information, click here. This is totally unacceptable!

More recently, we’ve found more examples of what we consider to be ethical challenges. We were unique in terms of proprietary features, and now we see those feature designs cited as “inspiration” by Amazon, telling us that their behavior will continue and be even more brazen. This is totally unacceptable!

We’ve already worked with a number of Cloud service providers, including Microsoft, Google, Alibaba, Tencent, Clever Cloud, and so on, which is proof enough that we can actually figure out a better way to collaborate. We even work with other parts of Amazon. We are always open to cooperation, provided it is within the limits acceptable to both sides.

I believe in the core values of the open source community: transparency, collaboration, openness. Create quality products to benefit global users. Elasticsearch and Kibana have made some amazing products and there will be more to come.

To be clear again, in all likelihood, this change will have no impact on you (our users), nor will it affect customers deployed with us in the cloud or on-premises.

We created Elasticsearch; We care about it more than anyone else. This is our life’s work. What we do every day is try to do more to promote technological progress and innovation.

Thank you for listening. If you have additional questions or need further clarification, please read here or contact us at [email protected].

Thank you very much! I’m honored to be on this journey with you.

Original: www.elastic.co/cn/blog/why…