> Slightly off topic but it saddens me that so much time money and effort from incredibly smart people is spent on this bullshit.

Was it bullshit when Debian wanted to make sure that Google Compute Engine images shipped as Debian didn't include proprietary software, components that would nonconsensually report telemetry to Google from within the guest operating system beyond what is inherent to the nature of any VM running within Google's cloud, or default configurations that are unjustifiably different in ways that are undocumented and/or would surprise and disrupt the usual expectations of Debian users?

Yes, trademark law is the reason Debian got to have those in-depth discussions and collaborations with Google. Source: I was quite personally involved, both as a Debian developer and as a then-Googler. (And Debian was more pragmatic than you might think about some of the specifics. I was surprised myself.)

Trademark law is not bullshit even though the term "intellectual property" is.

> No reasonable person is going to think that “Postgres for Amazon RDS” would be materially different to “Amazon RDS for Postgres”.

Not in the primary technical nature of the product or the underlying software, no, that's true. But in the overall aspect of whom to blame for the service's faults or credit with the service's strengths - in other words, who is viewed as endorsing the product with the corresponding responsibility for good or bad reputational and commercial consequences - then yes absolutely the naming does change that in a reasonable person's mind.

Imagine you were not a cloud infrastructure expert but rather a stock market investor who sees a lengthy global outage occur in a managed PostgreSQL service running on Amazon Web Services. Further imagine that the PostgreSQL project were commercial enough of an organization to run their own managed PostgreSQL service on AWS in competition to the one run by Amazon, and had PostgreSQL stock traded on a public stock exchange, similar to Elastic's real situation.

In this hypothetical scenario, is it not true that an outage in "the PostgreSQL for Amazon Database" would look bad for the PostgreSQL project and would make the investor likely to sell or short PostgreSQL stock and/or (since the two services compete) buy Amazon stock? And in the same scenario, is it not true that an outage in "the Amazon Database for PostgreSQL" would entirely swap the reputational and financial/commercial impact on both organizations?

(I'm saying "Amazon Database" instead of "RDS" to sidestep the inside-baseball question of whether someone happens to know that Amazon doesn't let external vendors make flavors of the suite of services called RDS. That's an implementation detail that could easily be false at some future time and upon which trademark law cannot usefully rely.)

> (which weren’t in place in this case)

Huh? Elastic definitely had a trademark in place. Not sure why you think they didn't.

> It’s absolute insanity that so much time effort and money is spent on this in so many places to try and skirt around trademarks [...] rather than focusing on the actual details of the product

Why do you assume that? My assumption is that both Elastic and Amazon spend much more on their products than on their attempts to comply with trademark law when naming their products.