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Amazon Web Services fulfilled its commitment to rename Amazon Elasticsearch Services, now Amazon OpenSearch Service. The name change was necessary because AWS and Elasticsearch BV had a falling out caused by the licensing of the Elasticsearch open-source software and pocketing the profits from its utility.

In 2015, AWS launched a cloud-based version for the search, analytics, and monitoring software, which posed competition for Elasticsearch BV, the company formed to commercialize the open-source project. The relationship between Elasticsearch BV and AWS did not improve, even after it went public in 2018.

The fork

In March 2019, AWS forked the Elasticsearch project by releasing its own version under a new name; Open Distro for Elasticsearch. Six months later, Elasticsearch BV filed a trademark complaint against AWS for using the same name. The complaint is still in court. By 2019, the concerns were that major cloud services companies could launch services that exploit open-source code without sharing the profits, which is what AWS does.

Software startups were concerned, which led to Redis Labs and MongoDB trying alternative software licenses as a defence against the predation. However, the problem is still present and concerning.

The startups are yet to solve the problem of big tech theft

In January 2021, Elasticsearch BV CEO and Co-founder Shay Banon announced the ElasticSearch and Kibana projects would drop the Apache 2.0 licenses and come up with new ones. The Elastic license and non-open-source Server-Side Public License (SSPL).

The company had the license change to prevent companies from taking the Elasticsearch and Kibana products, which are then fed directly as a service without collaborating with the originators of the technology. The renaming does nothing but help AWS in its avoidance of litigation, even as it uses its power to continue nefarious activities.