
MariaDB CEO accuses large cloud vendors of strip-mining open source - CrankyBear
https://www.zdnet.com/article/mariadb-ceo-accuses-large-cloud-vendors-of-strip-mining-open-source/
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Barrin92
I know that there's a lot of open source fans in the developer community but
I've honestly always seen it as some form of the tragedy of the commons.
Intellectual property is pretty much the only way a small group of developers
can differentiate themselves from a big player.

Nobody can compete with Amazon's discounts or their hardware, so if you
redistribute IP for free from developers to large companies, how is this
equitable, and what is so great about everyone becoming a consultant or
customer support as a way to make money?

I have great sympathy for products like Datomic for this reason, because
protecting your IP is in my opinion the only way to actually profit from your
craft, which is writing software. The 'consumer first' culture of open source
reminds me of the way musicians are being squeezed by internet platforms.

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axaxs
You're right - for most small teams. For companies with tons of money and
resources, probably a bit less so, as the barrier to entry becomes bigger and
bigger. That, and as Facebook proved time and again, they can afford to just
copy you from scratch.

For SAAS products, what I typically try to do is open source the libraries,
but not the product. So, for example, if I were to write something simple that
checked a device, and sent an email, assuming neither library existed, I'd
open source the device api library and the email library, but not the product
that uses the two in conjunction. I think it's a good balance.

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musicale
It seems like the most successful open source business models are 1) selling a
service that uses open source, 2) selling a product that uses open source, or
3) being acquired by a profitable company.

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spicypony
There are lots of ways to get to scale w/ an open source business model. One
way is to have a great product and then get on HN by slamming the cloud
vendors as strip miners :) There are a bunch of open source companies that
have achieved some fairly incredible scale such as Confluent / Kafka or
Hashicorp (u know the stuff Vagrant, Terraform and so on).

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theamk
If amazon's own RDS is that bad, can a startup (or MariaDB itself) help?

Hopefully one can offer "optimized/certified" MariaDB instances -- by buying
regular EC2 machines and then installing and managing the database on them.

The price of db.r5.xlarge is $0.48/hr vs regular r5.xlarge of $0.25/hour, so
people are obviously willing to pay for the managed solution.

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musicale
If they are "abusing the license" as he claims, why are there no legal
consequences?

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craftyguy
The only instance in the article where I could find that any actual details
about what the CEO meant was this:

> But, if AWS's going out of its way to make a rival service look inferior to
> its own, well, Howard's not happy about that.

So, AWS is not configuring mariadb optimally, or something. It has nothing to
do with license violations. This article title is clickbait.

