The dispute arose early last year after Elastic changed its license for Elasticsearch, a search and analytic engine, and the related data dashboard Kibana from the open-source Apache 2.0-license ALv2) to a more restrictive Server Side Public License (SSPL). SEE: Cloud computing is the key to business success. But unlocking its benefits is hard work SSLP was hatched in 2019 by MongoDB, the makers of an open-source NoSQL database, as a response to problems it had monetizing its offerings through major cloud providers. As ZDNet’s Steven Vaughan-Nichols explained at the time, Elastic on Azure and Elastic on Google Cloud were commercial partnership offerings. Elastic on AWS was not. “Our license change is aimed at preventing companies from taking our Elasticsearch and Kibana products and providing them directly as a service without collaborating with us,” Elastic said back then. Within days of Elastic’s license change, AWS went and forked Elasticsearch and Kibana. The AWS forks then moved to the OpenSearch Project, which reached version 1.0 in July. Around the same time, Elastic amended the Elasticsearch Python client to disable it on forks of Elasticsearch, as The Register reported. The trademark lawsuit pre-dates Elastic’s license change. In 2019, it added AWS to an existing trademark infringement lawsuit against several companies for using the terms Elasticsearch and Kibana in their products, including IBM’s “Cloud Databases for Elasticsearch”. Elastic CEO Ashutosh Kulkarni seems satisfied with the trademark agreement with AWS. “There is only one Elasticsearch, and it comes from Elastic. This means when you use Elasticsearch, whether as the Elastic Cloud service in AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud, or when you download and run Elasticsearch yourself, you can be sure that you’re getting the best possible experience because you are benefiting from 12 years of constant development and innovation from the people who created the product.”
