Elastic’s arguments are problematic considering the history of the codebase.
They didn’t invent “elasticsearch” from scratch, rather they took someone else’s codebase (Lucene) and made it better. Fundamentally that’s what AWS did too... they took open source code and improved on it to offer a very popular managed service. Elastic seems annoyed that AWS has executed better on the managed service front but aren’t offering up strong reasons for this being “NOT OK”. Elastic was happy to use code and concepts from others to build their product but seem annoyed when others did the same to them. I don’t get it.
The brand name thing might have more weight but it will come down to if they were truly enforcing the name the whole time they owned it or are just annoyed with AWS. If the name fell into common use they they likely won’t have much luck protecting it.
I'm really starting to dislike this notion of "Oh well Elastic deserves this since they build on an open source project, Lucene!"
There are two main differences here.
1. The scope of the change. My understanding is that Elasticsearch may use Lucene under the hood, but extends it in ways and for use cases that Lucene was not designed for. The same can not be said about AWS taking Elasticsearch and running it as a drop-in replacement.
2. Perhaps most importantly, Elasticsearch didn't build on top of Lucene, and then decide to call itself Lucene. If you think there is so little differentiation between the product you built and the product you built off of, that you are better off highjacking the name, then I question if you made any meaningful differences.
Lucene is a pretty low-level search library. It has no concept of clustering etc. etc. What ElasticSearch built on top is far from trivial. Furthermore, ElasticSearch pays a number of people to contribute back to the Lucene project.
As far as I know AWS hasn't contributed any code of note back to ElasticSearch or Lucene.
They didn’t invent “elasticsearch” from scratch, rather they took someone else’s codebase (Lucene) and made it better. Fundamentally that’s what AWS did too... they took open source code and improved on it to offer a very popular managed service. Elastic seems annoyed that AWS has executed better on the managed service front but aren’t offering up strong reasons for this being “NOT OK”. Elastic was happy to use code and concepts from others to build their product but seem annoyed when others did the same to them. I don’t get it.
The brand name thing might have more weight but it will come down to if they were truly enforcing the name the whole time they owned it or are just annoyed with AWS. If the name fell into common use they they likely won’t have much luck protecting it.