Red Hat is a top 2-4 contributor to the Linux kernel though, depending on what source (and year) you take a look (e.g. [1]).
The big difference is that Amazon doesn't contribute back. The comparison seems misguided at best.
[1] https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Linux-Gi...
alias docker=podmanWhy the heck would you feel sure of that? What evidence makes you think anything in Amazon's DNA would go in that direction? Amazon is blatantly missing from every open source conversation or ecosystem I've ever encountered. They give essentially NOTHING back except cheap infra as a service, and we pay dearly for it with the losses we get from their predatory behaviour toward any competing products
I use Amazon. But they're garbage for ecosystems.
imho Amazon is only good for Amazon (in the larger timescale), and maybe also for finding whatever economic McGuffin lies at the bottom of whatever race they happen to be in.
The existence and usage of “Open Distro for Elasticsearch” is not debatable. Whether it infringes trademarks is in court and whether a third party infringed elastic’s copyrights is also in court.
But also, that's contributing "out", not contributing "back". It's the difference between working with your neighbours, vs leaving your extra shit around your house on the curb for someone else to take.
The mechanics of how they relate to the groups from which they filter wealth, that matters imho.
When I get frustrated about how they don't really contribute, it's that I'm intensely cynical about the worldview from which their offerings come.
Anyhow, thanks for the generous comment, and the chance to reflect :)
I wonder if Shay regrets that decision in hindsight.
I would hate to be in their shoes, but it brings a valuable lesson to future entrepreneurs: Do fill the "unfair advantage" box in your business canvas.
No, these are services which probably use some kind of search/indexing service in their implementation. They don't provide a database interface.
The closed alternative would be something like Algolia or Azure Search.
Also my initial question was not purely rhetorical, I would assume "Linux" is also trademarked so I'm wondering what is the difference there and why Redhat selling RHEL has not been the same problem.
Also: https://www.infoworld.com/article/2671387/linus-gets-tough-o...
Edit: based on the Linux Foundation link in another comment, it seems they have a clear process for sublicensing the trademark. So I guess Elastic is claiming AWS just launched their ES service without their legal team ever having bothered looking into the trademark? That seems very strange for such a large company.
In addition to redhat employing a large number of kernel contributors, ElasticSearch is a complete product the Linux kernel is just a piece of the overall redhat product. The kernel in and of itself is useless. Also redhat provides source rpms for every non-proprietary app/utility that makes up the redhat product.
A more comparable situation would be redhat and centos, and to the point that Elastic is making, redhat is very protective of their trademarks with regards to the CentOs project, they have never stood for and would never stand for a situation like this.
I get that Elasticsearch wants to run their own company, but I really have no sympathy for their arguments here. They released open source software and now are mad that it is taking on a life of its own that they don’t 100% control. That’s the whole point of open source as far as I’m concerned, other people can do stuff you might not have expected with your code.
Now they’re making it more closed going forward, which is fine and is certainly their right to do. But this argument is so bizarre, instead of saying that we tried to do this open source but unfortunately it makes it too difficult for us as a business so we’re closing things off, they’re trying to spin it as they are the true, good defenders of open source fighting against the forces of evil by closing off their licensing further.