Take Banon, who founded Elastic and before that created the Elasticsearch project in 2010. As he tells it, he took out loans to trademark Elasticsearch to try to protect his work. This wasn’t the work of a rapacious open source corporate overlord. It was a developer trying to play by the open source rules (i.e., Red Hat, JBoss, and other early open source leaders relied on trademarks to protect their investments). By 2015, however, Amazon CTO Werner Vogels was calling the launch of the “Amazon Elasticsearch service, a great partnership between Elastic and AWS.”
Except it wasn’t. There was no partnership. There was nothing but AWS taking Elasticsearch and selling it as its own, with no contributions of cash, code, people, or anything else. For Elastic, it wasn’t about competition, but rather the way AWS sold the trademarked product. As Banon notes, “The problem was never AWS taking Elasticsearch and providing it, it was calling it AWS Elasticsearch and implying that it’s their service (including stating it explicitly).” According to Banon, “It’s a clear trademark infringement, but regardless of how much we tried, we had 1,000 lawyers thrown at us.”
Fortuitous forks
This brings us to the OpenSearch fork. Many thought AWS forking Elasticsearch sounded the death knell for Elastic. Nope. As I noted back in 2021, as good as OpenSearch may be for AWS, it hasn’t been bad for Elastic. Quite the contrary. By forcing AWS to build OpenSearch rather than borrow Elasticsearch, Elastic gave itself room to resume its open source ways. As Banon messaged me, “I personally always wanted to get back to open source, even when we changed the license. We were hoping AWS would fork and would let us move back when enough time has passed.” It was a calculated risk that appears to be paying off: “We just feel we can safely do it now that the fork has happened and it’s a big sunk cost for AWS,” he said.