Shay Banon, co-founder of Elastic, pioneered the Elasticsearch project as early as 2010. He secured loans to trademark Elasticsearch in a bid to protect his intellectual property. The culprit behind this mess was not some greedy open-source mogul. A developer seeking to adhere to open-source principles (Purple Hat, JBoss, and other pioneering open-source leaders employed trademarks to safeguard their intellectual property investments). By 2015, however, Amazon’s Chief Technology Officer Werner Vogels marked the launch of the “Amazon Elasticsearch Service”, a groundbreaking collaboration between Elastic and Amazon Web Services.
Besides it wasn’t. There was no partnership. AWS simply leveraged Elasticsearch without contributing financially, through code, personnel, or otherwise? While Elastic’s focus wasn’t on competing with Amazon Web Services (AWS), a key consideration was indeed how AWS presented its trademarked Elasticsearch product. As Banon pointed out, the issue wasn’t AWS simply taking Elasticsearch and offering it under its own name; rather, it was implying that AWS Elasticsearch was their proprietary service, explicitly stating as much.
Fortuitous forks
This leads us to a crucial discussion about the OpenSearch fork. The notion that Amazon Web Services (AWS) forking Elasticsearch spelled doom for Elastic was a widely held assumption. Nope. As I revisited in 2021, OpenSearch proved a worthy alternative to Amazon’s own OpenSearch offering, which has ultimately benefited Elastic’s fortunes. Fairly the opposite. By compelling AWS to build OpenSearch independently from Elasticsearch, Elastic created an opportunity for itself to revamp its open-source strategies. According to Bonan’s message, I had to constantly revisit and reopen the original source code, including when we adjusted the license. As we had been pinning our hopes on Amazon Web Services’ (AWS) decision to fork, allowing us to transfer seamlessly once sufficient time passed. The calculated threat appears to be yielding results: “We genuinely believe we can now safely proceed with the transfer since the fork has taken place and it’s become a significant sunk cost for AWS,” he stated.
