Re:Amazon: Not OK – Why we had to change Elastic licensing
by chippiewill on Tuesday January 19, 2021 @03:22PM
(#25838380)
I think there's a subtlety in the way Amazon as a company markets what they do and leverages the brand that's important here.
Take for instance Amazon RDS which is a family of managed relational database services. I don't think "Amazon RDS for MySQL" is an unfair use of the "MySQL" trademark, even if Amazon haven't asked Oracle's permission. The reason here is that it's much clearer in the way RDS is branded that it's not endorsed by the database engines it supports, it uses their trademarks to describe the engines they integrate with which seems reasonable in my view. Amazon RDS is still its own independent brand.
"Amazon Elasticsearch Service" crosses the mark in my opinion because it blurs the line between the two brands and in many ways implies that Amazon actually made Elasticsearch themselves.
Take for instance Amazon RDS which is a family of managed relational database services. I don't think "Amazon RDS for MySQL" is an unfair use of the "MySQL" trademark, even if Amazon haven't asked Oracle's permission. The reason here is that it's much clearer in the way RDS is branded that it's not endorsed by the database engines it supports, it uses their trademarks to describe the engines they integrate with which seems reasonable in my view. Amazon RDS is still its own independent brand.
"Amazon Elasticsearch Service" crosses the mark in my opinion because it blurs the line between the two brands and in many ways implies that Amazon actually made Elasticsearch themselves.