Elastic has resolved a trademark infringement lawsuit related to usage of the term “Elasticsearch.” Amazon has agreed to drop the term from its product line.
“We believe this resolution will remove confusion in the marketplace and provide much-needed clarity to our community and customers,” Elastic CEO Ashutosh Kulkarni said in the announcement.
“There is only one Elasticsearch, and it comes from Elastic.”
In January 2021, Elastic abandoned Elasticsearch’s open source licensing, claiming that AWS’s behavior “forced” the company to switch from the Apache 2.0-license to be dual-licensed under the Server Side Public License (SSPL) and the Elastic License. Elastic cited examples of what they perceived to be “ethically challenged behavior.”
Shortly after, Amazon led a community effort to fork the project in order to maintain its open source license. In September 2021, Amazon renamed its Amazon Elasticsearch Service to Amazon OpenSearch Service after adopting the fork.
Elastic initiated the trademark infringement lawsuit in 2019 after AWS launched an Open Distro for Elasticsearch in partnership with Expedia and Netflix. AWS said the motivation was to keep Elasticsearch open, because some of the more recent additions were proprietary. Amazon said the open distro was created “to accelerate open source Elasticsearch innovation.” Elastic claimed that the branding for this open distro violated their trademark.
AWS has agreed to drop all instances of Elasticsearch from its product line. The only Elasticsearch service listed on the AWS Marketplace now is the one from Elastic Cloud. Elastic has eased its prior animosity in communication and is now working towards a more amicable partnership in promoting Elastic Cloud in the AWS marketplace.
“Looking ahead, we’ll focus on collaborating with Amazon for the benefit of our shared customers who use Elastic on AWS,” Kulkarni said. “We are already seeing tremendous momentum in our partnership around our recent areas of investment to streamline data ingestion and simplify onboarding to Elastic Cloud on AWS.”
Sounds like there were some adults in the room. Common sense says that it would be infringement, and that a negotiated settlement was better for Amazon than losing—and being able to collaborate gives Elastic a wider reach than it would have alone.
(comments from a rank amateur)