I don't think Redhat could have built their whole business on the just the implied understanding that Linus is cool with it. I'm more talking about the trademark issue, did they legally get the right to use the Linux trademark in some way that Amazon Elasticsearch didn't? Just curious if there is any substance to what Elastic is claiming here or if it's purely a PR stunt.

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.