
AWS gives open source the middle finger? - uji
https://techcrunch.com/2019/01/09/aws-gives-open-source-the-middle-finger
======
int_19h
Amazon was using MongoDB without paying for it.

MongoDB found that objectionable, and changed the license such that Amazon
would either have to pay, or stop using it.

Amazon stopped using it, and started using its own in-house implementation
instead (presumably because it was cheaper to develop it than to pay MongoDB).

So, MongoDB got exactly what they asked for. It's just that, when they forced
Amazon to make a choice, they didn't expect one of the options they gave them
to be viable. They were wrong.

I don't see how Amazon is in the wrong here. They are no longer using MongoDB
for free, as the authors demanded. They did not reuse any code. They are not
advertising their replacement as MongoDB, either.

Is it because of API compatibility? But the notion that one cannot reimplement
a public API for the sake of compatibility is in and of itself extremely
hostile to the F/OSS ecosystem, given how many products in it are
reimplementations of proprietary APIs.

~~~
fogetti
Yeah, I don't understand it either. There is a company which puts 300 M$
effort into developing something and then another company is using the first
company's brand recognition to get a competitive edge while offering zero
added value (And no, hosting mongodb in AWS not a new thing, only uninformed
people would assume so. When I look around I find services like Scalegrid or
MDB Atlas itself which is exactly the thing that AWS is claiming to justify
their decision). So yeah, you are right, I can't see how could that be wrong
either.

~~~
pas
Morally it might be questionable, if it puts MongoDB out of business and
reinforces the AWS "monopoly".

However, MongoDB selected a free and open source license. This was always in
the cards. They went with AGPL to keep the source maximally open for end
users, but that never protected their revenue stream. (Some JS SDK companies
used it for that purpose, where it makes some sene, but a DB is very
different.)

But if they had started with something proprietary uptake would have been very
likely much less. And people would have continued to use mysql or Cassandra if
they really needed something "webscale".

~~~
bad_user
They recently switched to a new license, inspired by AGPL, that isn’t approved
by OSI and probably not Open Source.

So they are trying to eat their cake and have it too.

~~~
pas
It's not OSI because it places even more restrictions on usage than AGPL did,
but this is very much matter of context and interpretation. If GNU would have
created it it would have been welcomed by GNU-ers a lot better.

I sort of agree with their sentiment, but of course they are late to the have-
cake-will-have-it-and-eaten-it-too party, as now AWS was able to fork the last
AGPL-ed version and be done with it.

------
nemothekid
> _However, developers are technically savvy enough to distinguish between the
> real thing and a poor imitation. MongoDB will continue to outperform any
> impersonations in the market_

This feels like a MongoDB sponsored post. How badly would you have to fuck up
to be considered a poor imitation of MongoDB?

In any case I don't see how having their own hosted version of MongoDB is a
middle finger to open source, but Aurora SQL/PostgresQL isn't. Is Cockroach a
middle finger Postgres? I don't consider this any more a middle finger than
the SSPL.

~~~
tanilama
How credible techcrunch should be considered a reliable journalism source
here? This one smells pretty much like a money article

~~~
Aramgutang
That sentence was presented clearly as a quote from the MongoDB CEO, and
followed immediately by "[t]hat’s a pretty feisty comment."

I don't entirely disagree with your overall assessment, but it could just be a
case of clickbait journalism, rather than payola.

------
Pfhreak
I left AWS after six years of working there wholly because of their
restrictive policies about developing software in your spare time --
especially if you were thinking about working on a game.

I recognize this article is about a product offering of AWS, and not their
internal policies towards contributing to open source, but the two are linked
in my mind and I'm not all surprised to see a headline like this.

~~~
spectre256
I "accidentally" worked at amazon for a few weeks when a company I had just
joined was acquired by them.

I knew it was time to start looking when I was informed that I had to get
prior permission to do ANY open source contributions even on my own hardware
on my own time. That's just not feasible logistically and above and beyond the
general "don't write open source that competes with us or on our our
time/hardware without permission" rule most reasonable companies have.

~~~
Bahamut
Problem is, you could potentially encroach on a big company's interests
without knowing so, i.e. they're working in [insert space] in secret, or
create an ethical issue for the company. Truth is, excepting maybe Netflix,
the rest of FAANG requires you to get approvals.

~~~
TheDong
Every company that is based on california, or that employs you in california,
is better.

No matter what the non-compete says, if you're in CA, you can use your own
hardware and non-work time to develop anything that doesn't directly compete
with your employer/dayjob and doesn't use trade secrets/IP from the company.

Amazon though is mostly based in Washington, where no such law exists, so
sweeping non-competes are legal.

The above is the reason that there is a difference between various FAANG
companies. Even if the company policy requires you to get approval, if it
really isn't a work-related piece of code, you can simply tell them to pound
sand and CA will have your back.

~~~
quantumwannabe
This is misleading. While non-competes are enforceable in Washington,
employers can not force employees to sign away the rights to inventions
produced on their own time without employer resources.

Compare
[https://apps.leg.wa.gov/RCW/default.aspx?cite=49.44.140](https://apps.leg.wa.gov/RCW/default.aspx?cite=49.44.140)
to the equivalent CA law:
[https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/codes_displaySectio...](https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/codes_displaySection.xhtml?lawCode=LAB&sectionNum=2870)
. It's essentially the same wording.

~~~
brlewis
Isn't "invention" a patent term? Not all creative work is invention.

------
peterwwillis
From the movie "Revolution OS" [1], Richard Stallman explaining Copyleft:

 _" If we put the software in the public domain, somebody else would be able
to make a little bit of changes and turn that into a proprietary software
package, which means that the users would be running our software, but they
wouldn't have freedom to cooperate and share."_

 _" And what we do is, we say, this software is copyrighted and we, the
authors give you permission to redistribute copies, we give you permission to
change, we give you permission to add to it. But when you redistribute it, it
has to be under these terms, no more and no less. So that whoever gets it from
you also gets the freedom to cooperate with other people, if he wants to. And
then, in this way everywhere the software goes, the freedom goes, too. And it
becomes an inalienable right to cooperate with other people and form a
community."_

Bruce Perens, on the choice of the GPL for Debian:

 _" Uh, it's one of the few software licenses that was written from the
standpoint of the community rather than from the standpoint of um, protecting
a company or um, as is the case with MIT and BSD license, performing the goals
of a government grant program. Uh, and the GPL is really unique in that. It's
not just a license. It's a whole philosophy that, I think, motivated the open
source definition."_

MongoDB tried to protect its company's profits, and as a result, Amazon [and
its users] now have a proprietary product rather than an open source one.
Could have gotten free fixes from the biggest lab in the world, but instead
they're getting jack squat. And since Amazon's product is proprietary, now
users and the community have less freedom.

Linus is asked at the end if he's bothered that he's not cashing out on
billions of dollars of use, and he basically doesn't care. He just wanted
people to work on the software. If Linux had the same licensing scheme, it may
have remained a hobby operating system.

[1]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Eluzi70O-P4#t=17m](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Eluzi70O-P4#t=17m)

~~~
depr
>Linus is asked at the end if he's bothered that he's not cashing out on
billions of dollars of use

Linus has an annual salary of $10 million,
[https://www.therichest.com/celebnetworth/celebrity-
business/...](https://www.therichest.com/celebnetworth/celebrity-
business/tech-millionaire/linus-torvalds-net-worth/)

~~~
icelancer
That is a hilariously low salary given the impact of Linux on the world today.

~~~
typon
After a certain point, more money doesn't really help the cause

------
tobyjsullivan
"AWS gives MongoDB the middle finger" would be a more accurate, less
sensationalist headline.

Making a business choice to not buy licenses from a single for-profit company
doesn't really have anything to do with open source in general.

~~~
demarq
where art thou dang to come help us?

------
_cs2017_
WTF with this title. We all agree API shouldn't be licenseable, but now we
expect companies to feel like they shouldn't use API for free because without
licensing the source code "it looks bad"?

~~~
nybble41
What does this even have to do with Open Source? MongoDB isn't Open Source;
not any more. Their new Server Side Public License is not an OSI-approved Open
Source license, and the _intent_ of the license change goes directly against
the 6th criteria of the Open Source Definition ("No Discrimination Against
Fields of Endeavor").

~~~
JohannesH
While I agree with what you said it is important to note that the OSI isn't
the defining authority on what is to be considered open source.

~~~
klez
I keep seeing this sentence (or variations thereof) on every thread about this
topic.

It sounds weird to me that people think a foundation created by Perens and
Raymond (et al.), the people who defined Open Source, and wrote the Open
Source Definition is not the defining authority on what open source is.

What gives?

~~~
cmsj
I think the idea there is that one body shouldn't have a proprietary lock on
what counts as Open Source and what doesn't. OSI/OSD as the loudest voices of
what is OSS, is helpful, but they shouldn't be the only voices.

(As much as I get annoyed by things claiming to be open source, that really
aren't proper open source, I have to accept that this is a movement brought
about by a rag-tag bunch of hackers who don't much care for single entities
telling them what to do, so they should also be measured by that)

~~~
pessimizer
It was a movement brought by an organized group of professionals who thought
that the viral nature of the GPL kept business from taking advantage of the
new commons. They created an organization to monitor use of the new term "Open
Source," which would be a superset of the GPL, without the onerous-to-business
requirement of sharing your changes.

------
notyourwork
> “However, developers are technically savvy enough to distinguish between the
> real thing and a poor imitation. MongoDB will continue to outperform any
> impersonations in the market.”

That's a bold statement to make against AWS services.

~~~
dmlittle
For what it's worth when it comes to choosing a hosted ElasticSearch provider
I would go to Elastic over AWS Elasticsearch Service.

~~~
notyourwork
Interesting, as someone considering using AWS ES for an upcoming project I'd
love to hear more about your experience.

~~~
ratling
It's new enough to be a second tier AWS service (they tend to have odd
performance issues or less than ideal pricing models). My understanding is
that they also block off portions of the management API that you'd typically
use to maintain your own cluster and that they've had some reliability
problems.

------
toyg
A lot of people are focusing on the bitchiness, but to me this is actually
interesting from the perspective of (F)OSS evolution.

This scenario is one of the many where (F)OSS explicitly protects downstream
users: company reduces availability, user forks. It just so happens that the
traditional players (the small, indie user va the big, bad corp) are actually
mirrored (big, bad user vs small, indie corp). This has been the ugly reality
of OSS for more than a decade now, and there seems to be no way to align the
interests of “big users” more closely with upstream. Before the switch last
year, MongoDB already used the most “aggressively collectivist” license
available, and still it didn’t protect them from rich freeloaders.

This is also the other side of the coin in the Google vs Oracle debate about
apis and copyright.

~~~
geezerjay
> it didn’t protect them from rich freeloaders.

You offer a free software package to the world, so that anyone can use it as
they see fit.

Some guy uses your software package.

How exactly has that guy became a freeloader in this story?

~~~
mcv
Because they have money and don't use it to support the community. Nobody is
saying it explicitly, but of course we want small indie people to be able to
use stuff for free while rich corporations foot the bill. But it's hard to
codify that in a way that doesn't explicitly so, and it's hard to enforce a
rule where something is free only if you're small or poor, but it costs money
if you're big and rich. And to see the largest corporation in the world use
Open Source stuff for free without sharing anything back to the community,
well, that doesn't sit right with a lot of people.

~~~
rjf72
It's not at all hard to have a license where something is free for
noncommercial or limited commercial usage, and premium otherwise. This is an
extremely typical model for many products today whose licenses you could use
as inspiration. See for instance things like Microsoft's Visual Studio. And
the nice thing is that contract law is really quite powerful and very much on
your side when it comes to enforcement. You don't need Microsoft's legal
department to enforce your rights.

In my opinion I feel like the real issue is that many in the open source
community want to have their cake and eat it to. They want to put ideas out
there ostensibly for free and be part of the social communal movement, but
when those ideas are actually used to generate value - they want to see the
checks roll in. That's just not how it works. Look at products that are funded
by donations. There are some exceptions, but the general rule is that they end
up grossly underfunded and have to be more and more aggressive with requests
for donations just to stay afloat. If people want payment, then demand
payment. If you want to give away something for free, don't ever expect to get
paid for it.

~~~
toyg
It's not unreasonable to wish for a middle ground where small actors don't
have to pay and big actors do.

 _> a license where something is free for noncommercial or limited commercial
usage, and premium otherwise._

That's basically what Mongo have switched to. Unfortunately, this broke other
bits of community, because playing with licenses is actually not that easy.

My point is that, maybe, we need a new license that can reflect the changed
times. GPL 3 wanted to be that license, but it doesn't look like it succeeded.
The new licenses attempted piecemeal by this or that company (like Mongo) will
always fail to cut it, because the are typically not written by people with
significant experience and knowledge in this particular field (license-
writing).

Maybe it's time for interested companies and expert stakeholders (FSF etc) to
come together and try to agree on something that could move us all forward.

~~~
helen___keller
Just to be clear, the FSF does not agree with your distinction. The FSF only
endorses free software, which means free for all users, commercial or
noncommercial (
[https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/categories.en.html](https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/categories.en.html)
):

>Proprietary software is another name for nonfree software. In the past we
subdivided nonfree software into “semifree software”, which could be modified
and redistributed noncommercially, and “proprietary software”, which could not
be. But we have dropped that distinction and now use “proprietary software” as
synonymous with nonfree software.

>The Free Software Foundation follows the rule that we cannot install any
proprietary program on our computers except temporarily for the specific
purpose of writing a free replacement for that very program. Aside from that,
we feel there is no possible excuse for installing a proprietary program.

~~~
toyg
The FSF doesn't have a monopoly on the sentiment of open-source communities.
Their principles were developed in a very different scenario, which is the
point of my comment.

~~~
helen___keller
I just meant specifically for your call to action

> Maybe it's time for interested companies and expert stakeholders (FSF etc)

That the FSF likely would have no interest in participating in such an
activity since it would betray their core principles (regardless of whether
you or i feel that this principle is sound)

------
bradrydzewski
mongodb announced the Server Side Public License change less than 12 weeks
ago. When you account for end of year and holidays, building a new product
line and rolling it out in such a short period of time seems unlikely. I would
guess this has been in the works for a while (although admittedly I could be
overestimating engineering effort and underestimating amazon engineering
talent).

~~~
maximilianburke
MongoDB could have been having conversations with Amazon prior, trying to
negotiate a licensing agreement. These negotiations take a lot of time at
corporations, I could easily see someone saying "hey, MongoDB's starting to
squeeze us, let's get some people working on Plan B before they cut us off".

------
jgowdy
"When the terms you offer are accepted, hold to them. Else no one will trust
you."

For someone to release a major software package under an open source license
with particular terms, and then to get angry when other people enjoy that
software under the terms that YOU specified, is just nonsense. You aren't
happy with the way things played out, because you didn't really understand the
types of activities that were possible or maybe just didn't think about it.

Look, it's their software and they can re-license it as they see fit. But to
vilify AWS for using their open source software legitimately under the terms
they licensed it under is offensive. _That_ is giving the middle finger to
open source.

How exactly the author of this article can write something that finds fault in
the company using software legitimately under an open source license, and not
with the company who is re-licensing their software to a non-OSI license? Who
is truly giving the middle finger to open source?

------
talkingtab
The most important issue to me is that Amazon benefits from open source not
only without supporting it, but by threatening it. While we can argue whether
it is MongoDb or not and other issues, it is clear that Amazon benefits.
Otherwise why not simply invent their own API? They have the benefit of a well
thought out system, of a large pool of people who know and can use MongoDB.
Can they afford to support MongoDB? If not perhaps they should just 'fess up.

The open source system is great. Many individuals create the content and share
it. There has been a great tolerance for companies like Amazon that exploit -
not use but exploit - this community. While I don't have enough experience to
know if MongoDB's response was a good one, I do think it is time for the
community at large to begin a continuing discussion of what to do when large
companies like Amazon are bad citizens.

Open source thrives on being ... well open, and it is important to retain that
openness _within_ the community.

------
exabrial
It's mongodb though... It's well documented at this point you shouldn't be
using mongo on anything that matters

~~~
threeseed
And yet many of us are using it in Production.

Including companies like Adobe, eBay, Expedia, Sony etc.

~~~
pritambaral
The fact that some are okay with and would use an unreliable tool is not
inconsistent with the fact that it is documented that the tool is unreliable.
Popularity among users has little to do with the tool being reliable, and this
particular one is already popular for being unreliable.

~~~
threeseed
What you are saying doesn't really make any sense.

A systemically unreliable database would never be popular as its not a piece
of your architecture that you can tolerate having constant outages with. And
there is no evidence of MongoDB being systemically unreliable.

~~~
pritambaral
> A systemically unreliable database would never be popular

1\. Correctness and popularity are different

2\. Not everyone looks for correctness, even when looking for a database. See:
MySQL.

> as its not a piece of your architecture that you can tolerate having
> constant outages with

Reliability and correctness are not binary scales of 'works' vs. 'does not
work'. Again, see MySQL.

> there is no evidence of MongoDB being systemically unreliable

There is plenty of evidence of MongoDB losing writes because of its (honestly)
stupid design: writing to memory maps instead of files, never fsyncing,
sharding and distributing without confirming disk flush.

\---

MySQL: For a long time, one needed to be aware of certain caveats and corners
and limitations of MySQL or be surprised with data inconsistency and loss.
That is not to say that MySQL could not be operated reliably; it could, just
that the barrier was higher than it appeared.

From truncating data (with a warning) to not accepting and silently (i.e.,
without warnings) ignoring CHECK constraints, I've had clients who lost
business data and realized it only too late to go back to the original data
source.

I used to think MySQL was an bad database due to its concessions of
correctness and poor documentation, until MongoDB came along with their lofty
marketing and high-and-mighty "Nobody needs SQL anymore, we are Web-scale"
blare-horn and failed to deliver on even keeping the data it claimed to have
saved.

------
ilovecaching
> "To be fair, AWS has become more active in open source lately"

What are they referring to?

From my perspective, Amazon rarely open sources their work. It's one of the
reasons I would never want to work at Amazon. It's very clear they have no
love for technology outside of making a business out of it.

~~~
yjftsjthsd-h
Firecracker? That was a big one to me.

~~~
whoisjuan
Correto too.

------
crb002
More like Mongo gave AWS the finger, then AWS said fine and started using
Postgres. Now Mongo is upset that they have an inferior product that is losing
market share because they killed of their potentially laregest cloud
deployment.

------
benologist
Bezos gives _everyone_ the middle finger. Doesn't matter if you're part of the
massive open source stack they profit from or one of their workers unfairly
paid trying to meet unfair workload demands or one of the 100s of countries,
states and cities they relentlessly conspire to steal taxes from.

What's really funny about their not-mongodb as a service is they will
inevitably roll over any piece of software _third parties_ host on AWS too if
they think it makes enough money. Your SaaS is just another project for some
team waiting on their next. They have already done that for 10,000s of
physical products on Amazon.com that were sold by third party vendors who
became redundant via Amazon releasing similar products under their own brands.

~~~
harrumph
>is they will inevitably roll over any piece of software

Can you please clarify? I'm researching AWS and am interested in the
historical practices of the company, but I'm not sure what "roll over" means
in the context you used it.

~~~
benologist
I mean they will inevitably go through the websites people are hosting on AWS
looking for profitable software to copy, because that's what Amazon has always
done to people making money on Amazon.

~~~
harrumph
Thanks - I suspected you were saying as much. MongoDB aside, can you share
examples of this process?

~~~
benologist
Some of the physical merchandise they've copied, they have many more brands:

[https://www.amazon.com/AmazonBasics/b?node=10112675011](https://www.amazon.com/AmazonBasics/b?node=10112675011)

They have been copying SaaS straight from their partners for years already
too:

[https://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/03/08/amazon_copies_partn...](https://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/03/08/amazon_copies_partner_products/)

I think you can add Heroku (AWS Beanstalk) even before that.

~~~
harrumph
Thanks again!

------
hannob
The headline is as misleading and wrong as it could be.

AWS is not giving open source the middle finger. It is giving the middle
finger to a project that was once open source and has decided to be no longer
open source.

------
throw2016
We are in the middle of a transformation and its clear open source will have
to change. There is little stopping cloud providers and other well funded
parties monetizing your projects leaving little room for you to.

Because they don't have to focus on development they can divert their
resources to marketing, adding the syrup on top to 'ease use' and ride the
hype wave while the original developers are dismissed as 'technical' folks who
do not understand marketing when the fact is they do not have time left over
from development, or the resources.

It's perfectly legitimate to expect to sustain yourself while building open
source products and projects. Unfortunately we are flooded with one sided
superficial perspectives and short term narratives that look at open source
projects as if its a crime to expect to make some money while not even
examining slightly the parasitic models of cloud providers and others who in
effect hijack open source projects with marketing.

The end game is few can compete with the resources, reach and engineering of
behemoths like AWS, Azure, GCP and others. And at the customer end the cloud
is unavoidable and thus will only see increased adoption. This is not only
going to affect open source but dismantle entire groups of software and
hardware ecosystems.

The only way forward seems open source projects that leverage these cloud
platforms to provide some additional functionality, but these projects will be
intimately tied to these platforms and not 'open' as we understand the term.

~~~
ovao
> It's perfectly legitimate to expect to sustain yourself while building open
> source products and projects.

I’m not convinced that should be the case. Any business endeavor carries risk,
whether its basis is open source software, closed-source software, or any
other product type, and one shouldn’t have an _expectation_ of any level of
success.

There are fortunately many success stories relating to open source software,
so from my perspective it’s unclear that anything needs to change.

------
justinjlynn
> However, developers are technically savvy enough to distinguish between the
> real thing and a poor imitation. MongoDB will continue to outperform any
> impersonations in the market.

 _snerk_ Well, if it doesn't lose your data or have broken replication
protocols for years, then it'd be a poor imitation, so I'll give the CEO that
one.

------
callumjones
Where was the outrage when they implemented the MySQL and Postgres interfaces
on Aurora?

~~~
buremba
They're basically killing a company behind an open-source project.

~~~
swish_bob
Behind a _formerly_ open-source project.

------
cperciva
Seems to me that Mongo gave AWS the middle finger two years ago.

~~~
koolba
What happened two years ago?

~~~
whoisjuan
They changed the licensing basically forcing Amazon to pay or stop using Mongo
or build something else. But at an AWS level that's a lot of money apparently,
so they stopped using it.

Maybe I'm wrong. Anyone feel free to correct me.

~~~
koolba
I thought he was referencing that but the license change was more recent, Oct
2018: [https://www.mongodb.com/press/mongodb-issues-new-server-
side...](https://www.mongodb.com/press/mongodb-issues-new-server-side-public-
license-for-mongodb-community-server)

------
cobbzilla
Flamebait. Replace “open source” with “MongoDB” (the company, not the code)
then the title makes much more sense, and the article is kind of a
nothingburger.

------
bwb
Stupid title for the article. Inflammatory and I bet tc got some eyeballs.

------
cmmartin
A major part of the success of open source has been the fact that companies
have the option to fork/tweak/sell the code. MongoDB has benefited from this
as much as anyone. They gained the adoption levels they have now by
advertising these exact benefits. Only later did they decide you need a
commercial license to provide it as a service. How many companies would have
thought twice about using MongoDB had they thought they would eventually have
to pay for it and/or couldn't monetize it themselves?

Also, it's not like Amazon is not giving back to the open source community
([https://aws.amazon.com/opensource/](https://aws.amazon.com/opensource/))

~~~
kemitchell
You don't need a commercial license to provide SSPL code itself as a hosted
service if you release the service-rigging code you use to do so.

As for the most typical use case, web apps, see their FAQ:

> The copyleft condition of Section 13 of the SSPL applies only when you are
> offering the functionality of MongoDB, or modified versions of MongoDB, to
> third parties as a service. There is no copyleft condition for other SaaS
> applications that use MongoDB as a database.

[https://www.mongodb.com/licensing/server-side-public-
license...](https://www.mongodb.com/licensing/server-side-public-
license/faq#implications)

Compare their prior, public clarification on the scope of AGPLv3:

> Note however that it is NOT required that applications using mongo be
> published. The copyleft applies only to the mongod and mongos database
> programs. This is why Mongo DB drivers are all licensed under an Apache
> license. You application, even though it talks to the database, is a
> separate program and “work”.

[https://www.mongodb.com/blog/post/the-
agpl](https://www.mongodb.com/blog/post/the-agpl)

Much as Kernel developers published a statement clarifying and limiting the
sweep of GPLv2 copyleft, Mongo published a statement clarifying and limiting
the sweep of AGPLv3 copyleft.

I've heard from a former Mongo employee that Mongo wrote several letters to
users and vendors, assuring them that AGPLv3 didn't require release of their
app code.

------
Lazare
That's a very tendentious title.

------
holografix
Is there a license category that says something like: "Anyone can use our tech
to build stuff with for free however you may not re-sell our tech wrapped in
maintenance or hosting services"?

If you're a small open source company with a services business model, how do
you stop someone like AWS forking your code, making a few changes they don't
share with you and basically becoming the de-facto supplier of maintenance and
services for your tech?

~~~
hannob
> Is there a license category that says something like: "Anyone can use our
> tech to build stuff with for free however you may not re-sell our tech
> wrapped in maintenance or hosting services"?

Yes, there is. It's what MongoDB did. It's not Open Source.

> If you're a small open source company with a services business model, how do
> you stop someone like AWS forking your code, making a few changes they don't
> share with you and basically becoming the de-facto supplier of maintenance
> and services for your tech?

You have a business model that does not work. You've been lying to your
investors claiming that you have one. That's exactly the MongoDB story.

~~~
kemitchell
> It’s what MongoDB did.

That’s incorrect. MongoDB’s Server Side Public License differs from Commons
Clause and some of the “community” licenses from other database companies
we’ve seen. The latter prohibit hosting programs as a service for others. SSPL
explicitly permits that, but triggers copyleft, so the service rigging code
must be released under the same terms.

------
SergeAx
Implementing MongoDB API is something like implementing SQL language, doesn't
it? Plus communication protocol with auth, of course.

------
Sir_Cmpwn
>a hosted drop-in replacement for MongoDB that doesn’t use any MongoDB code

Is there any evidence for this? I assumed they forked the last Apache 2.0
version of Mongo.

~~~
detaro
Mongo was AGPL, not Apache 2. It seems unlikely Amazon was willing to
integrate an AGPL code into AWS.

~~~
Sir_Cmpwn
My bad, thanks for clarifying.

------
socrateslee
Scaling mongodb is not easy, and may this is why AWS DocumentDB is built
instead of providing an RDS version of mongodb?

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VvR-Ox
I don't even wonder.

It's not just Open Source who will get nasty signs from amazon. They already
have too much power for one company and the more power they'll have the less
they have to abide by rules normal companies/humans have to abide by.

~~~
geezerjay
How are you breaking any rule if all you're doing is using a software package
that's distributed with a FLOSS license?

Isn't that the whole point of releasing software under a FLOSS license?

------
perseusprime11
RIP MongoDB

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techslave
not sure this is worth the controversial title. good on amazon.

------
kerng
Yeah, overall this seems like a bad move by Amazon on multiple fronts. The
name of the new service is DocumentDB, which by itself is a name they have
recycled from competitors...

~~~
knocte
Is this comment supposed to be irony?

------
fogetti
Very well put. I already found disgusting what AWS did with Dynamodb (adding
key-eviction, etc as a catch-up with MDB) but this is even more hideous.

~~~
whoisjuan
MongoDB has a terrible reputation when it comes to scalability and support. If
you search you can find a bunch of horror stories. I don't have any angle to
condemn or support this move, but it definitely seems like a response to what
AWS customers and the market were asking for: "Give us a managed MongoDB or
MongoDB-like service that doesn't suck"

~~~
fogetti
I find a bunch of horror stories about DynamoDB and PostgreSQL too. Your point
is? How is that even related to the fact that AWS is basically piggybacking on
MongoDB-s R&D effort and brand recognition?

Also it's clear that you have zero knowledge about Mongodb hosted services.
Because otherwise you would know that very good supported hosted services
exist which are 100% compatible with AWS (beside MDB Atlas).

