
AWS, MongoDB, and the Economic Realities of Open Source - abd12
https://stratechery.com/2019/aws-mongodb-and-the-economic-realities-of-open-source/
======
pjc50
Two comments:

Firstly, the discussion at the front about the music industry is quite
insightful, but I'd go further - they didn't want to sell convenience at
first. Used to the physical embodiment of recordings rather than the de-
materialized reality of digital music, they spent years working on _mandated
inconvenience_ through DRM and other legal actions. Always remember that if
the music industry had won unopposed you'd have to pay a license fee to set a
MP3 as your ringtone, as well as having to license every copy on every device
separately.

Secondly, about mongodb: I'm reminded of
[https://www.gwern.net/Complement](https://www.gwern.net/Complement)
"Commoditize Your Complement", but in reverse.

Open source software is by definition commoditized. Everyone can have a copy
at no cost. So what is an "open source VC funded" company doing? Creating
complements and selling those. It's just that there's no intrinsic reason that
the same company that gives away labour as OSS should also make the best
complements to that OSS. It's not a law of nature that e.g. Redhat should be
the best people to provide consultancy on RHEL.

The music industry did not expect their product to become free to distribute
at the margin, but every company operating as an "OSS startup" has to know
from the start that their software can't be charged for directly.

~~~
scarface74
I realize that the idea of “Commoditizing Your Complements” has gained new
life lately on HN, but let’s give credit where it’s due - Joel Spolsky in
2002.

[https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/06/12/strategy-
letter-v/](https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/06/12/strategy-letter-v/)

~~~
ShardPhoenix
The first four words of the linked Gwern article are "Joel Spolsky in 2002".
In fact he gives him credit 3 times!

~~~
statictype
Yes but why not link to the original (which is also more readable)

------
KaoruAoiShiho
Agreed, the dream of a megacap open source company is dead. Mongodb shows
this, the Unity fiasco (I'm surprised nobody has put the two together) shows
this:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18874400](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18874400)
Guys, charge for your work. Don't place the economic value of your company to
be ancillary to your product. That just invites another company that has that
ancillary as their core competency to come and do it much better than you
while you waste time creating this free thing that other people free-ride off
of.

More on unity: [https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2019/01/unity-engine-tos-
chan...](https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2019/01/unity-engine-tos-change-makes-
cloud-based-spatialos-games-illegal/)

Here's the main difference between unreal and unity. Unreal costs 5% royalty
per sale, meaning their product is extremely expensive to the developer if
sales are high. Unity is generally royalty free and relies on "support and
services" to make money. This is why Unreal will always encourage the growth
of the ecosystem while Unity jealously guards the actual profit centers of the
business, because Unity makes nothing on its core product!

~~~
tanilama
> megacap open source company

Isn't this by itself an oxymoron? Open source isn't shouldn't be one's
marketing stunt to gain attention, if you want to charge your software make it
proprietary and charge people for license. Using open source as a last resort
bait isn't cool.

My only jab at Amazon is that they should give back their code to the
community or they need to be forced to do so, not that they can't make money
from OSS software, if that is what license at the time, permits.

~~~
nickpsecurity
The problem is the licenses suck. Parity and Prosper solve these problems with
Parity covering your use case:

[https://licensezero.com/](https://licensezero.com/)

~~~
JoshTriplett
Those aren't Open Source licenses, so that's the same as the suggestion in the
parent comment to make the software proprietary and charge for licenses.

~~~
nickpsecurity
Parity is an open source license that should achieve the goal of contribution
sharing better than the others since it's wording focuses on changes, not
distribution models.

[https://licensezero.com/licenses/parity](https://licensezero.com/licenses/parity)

It also has a patent license, unlike many permissive ones. They shouldnt even
qualify as open source if you can get sued under patent law for using that
software. Need some patent protection in license.

~~~
JoshTriplett
> Parity is an open source license

No, it isn't:
[https://opensource.org/licenses/alphabetical](https://opensource.org/licenses/alphabetical)

A few issues:

> 3\. Contribute software you develop, deploy, monitor, or run with this
> software.

That goes farther than the OSI, FSF, or DFSG allows, extending into software
that is not in any way derived from the licensed software.

It's also not obvious from the license that it allows private modifications
that aren't distributed to _anyone_.

> To contribute software, publish all its source code, in the preferred form
> for making changes, through a freely accessible distribution system widely
> used for similar source code

This requires that you publish your code publicly, rather than just providing
it to those you provide binaries to.

~~~
kemitchell
license-review deja vu! To recite my views:

Parity conforms to the Open Source Definition as written. "Is it open source?"
and "Has OSI approved it?" are related, but distinct, questions, as
acknowledged by OSI process.

OSI-approved copyleft licenses already sweep broader than derivative works of
the licensed software.

OSI has approved copyleft terms requiring contribution back of private
changes.

~~~
bradrydzewski
Have you considered submitting for OSI approval?

------
reacweb
When you give money to redhat, you buy insurance that if you encounter a
problem, they will support you. It is expencive, but there is clearly a lot of
work involved in producing new release. IMHO redhat deserves its money.

When you give money to Oracle, you are financing lawyers who try to find the
best way to make you pay more without improving the software.

~~~
pweissbrod
"IMHO redhat deserves its money". I agree. But the vast majority of people
employ CentOS which is redhats derivative.

Oracle engineers work hard on java and deserve their money but the vast
majority of people employ OpenJDK which is OracleJDKs derivative.

~~~
pjc50
For a long period of time I regarded Oracle as absolutely undeserving owners
of the JDK; they didn't write it, it was bought from Sun, they shipped adware
in the installer, tried to sue Android out of existence, and were poor
stewards of the language.

~~~
dstroot
You wrote in the past tense. Did something change your view?

~~~
gcb0
well, with openjdk nobody remembers oracle now. so I guess that changed.

if oracle wanted to continue to be the owners of Java they shouldn't have
called their bluff and sued Google.

~~~
pjmlp
OpenJDK is mostly developed by Oracle employees. There isn't OpenJDK without
them.

Oracle did the right thing against Android J++.

------
avar
> It is hard to imagine [AWS, Microsoft, and Google] ever paying for open
> source software.

It's surprising that someone setting out to write about the changing economies
of open source ends up missing the point so thoroughly. These companies are
some of the biggest contributors to open source.

What they aren't likely to want to pay for is a site license from some company
trying to sell them a MongoDB under terms practically identical to what Oracle
does for Oracle DB. That's the "CD" model the article could make a comparison
to.

I don't think we're ever going to have something like an open source version
of the Oracle model that's equally sustainable, just like the notion that
you're going to buy an entire album to listen to one song isn't coming back.

Rather, open source is going to be something where you might run a database
like PostgreSQL, and if you're a big enough user contribute to its
development, either yourself or by paying some support company of core devs.
That company might also provide support, or you could go with another provider
for that etc.

~~~
BrentOzar
> These companies are some of the biggest contributors to open source.

I wouldn't expect AWS to make a lot of code contributions to MongoDB when
they've built something else that's 3.6 compatible, though. It's not like
they're going to make contributions to a new, incompatible version of MongoDB.
They've already made the call to fork.

I agree with what you're saying about other products, but not this particular
case.

~~~
lwf
It isn't a fork, it's an entirely new database that implements the same API.

c.f.
[https://twitter.com/nathankpeck/status/1083385031207387136](https://twitter.com/nathankpeck/status/1083385031207387136)
from someone at AWS DevRel.

There's nothing about Mongo's license that's super relevant here -- it's a
similar situation to other cloud providers offering "S3"\- or "EC2"-compatible
APIs.

(IANAL, but AIUI API copyright/fair-use isn't entirely settled in the US,
Oracle v. Google nonwithstanding, since 9th Cir. isn't per se controlling
precedent nationwide in copyright matters)

~~~
count
Also important is the API that AWS is compatible with was itself part of the
OSS licensed code of an old version of mongo. Oracle vs. Google is different
as Java was never OSS licensed.

------
donatj
Honestly at this point I would rather use Closed Source software than Open
Source that isn’t “Free as in Speech”. It’s a wolf in sheep’s clothing. At
least closed source is honest about its intentions.

I use Free Software not because the price, but rather so I can be Free. So I
can know I am free to use software I develop with it in whatever way I want.

I find the push to market open source by limiting it’s use one of the most
distasteful things in recent software history.

~~~
marcinzm
MongoDB's new license does not in any way prevent you from using MongoDB in
whatever way you want. It simply requires you to, in some cases, release the
changes you make to it publicly. You know, like the GPL did before companies
found that a SaaS model let's you side step the release changes requirement.

~~~
dspillett
>* like the GPL did before companies found that a SaaS model let's you side
step the release changes requirement*

Unless you use AGPL where the trigger for releasing your modifications is
making the change available by any means (direct or otherwise) rather than
with the standard GPL where the trigger is distribution of outputs compiled
from the modified version.

~~~
marcinzm
MongoDB did use the AGPL and still had issues with companies trying to argue
they didn't need to release their changes. So they switched to their own
license which was even more explicit on the matter.

~~~
GenghisSean
What problems did MongoDB run into? Can you link to any specific instances?

~~~
dspillett
I think it was specifically Amazon not releasing their changes.

Maybe AGPL would cover them and force the release, but if Amazon stuck their
heals down it would be an expensive legal fight. My guess is that it was just
easier to change the licence used going forward to one that is more explicit
and unambiguous about the matter.

It was my understanding that AGPL was supposed to cover this specific type of
use, so would also be interested in know if there is a real problem or if the
licence change was simply to make the point without needing to go lawyer-to-
lawyer with someone in possession of Amazon's resources.

~~~
detaro
I'd actually be kind of surprised if Amazon did actually use it - most of the
big tech companies are allergic to AGPL, and e.g. Google does not allow it to
be used at all, even internally.

~~~
dspillett
_> I'd actually be kind of surprised if Amazon did actually use it_

They did, which is how this discussion started.

Until 4.0.4 / 4.1.5 MondoDB was released under the AGPL licence. Upon those
releases it switched to SSPL (which IIRC is APL plus extra "commons clauses").
Amazon have stopped using MongoDB as they do not want to (or for some reason
are unable to) abide by this new license, but had previously been happy to use
the code under [their interpretation of] AGPLv3.

~~~
detaro
I haven't seen a source clearly saying that Amazon had been using MongoDB - I
thought the DocumentDB release last week was the first MongoDB product they
offered?

EDIT: and searching HN comments, there's multiple people claiming AGPL is
entirely banned inside Amazon too

~~~
dspillett
In which case I don't see why this is such a big issue. Amazon couldn't use it
before the change because of their licence use policy, and can't after the
change either. So the change represents no change in that respect.

Implementing an interface compatible with something that you can't use for
licensing reasons is no biggie. Other projects, Free/free/OS/commercial, do
that sort of thing all the time.

I wonder where the problem that drove the change actually was... RH dropping
it from their distro _is_ an issue related to the licence change, but I don't
get the impression that was the intended target.

I should probably find time to dig back into the details, as I feel I've
missed something notable.

------
talkingtab
It is a good read, with good insights. The conclusion - "This tradeoff is
inescapable" is true only to the extent that a new model for open source does
not arise. Stepping back a couple thousand feet, open source is an amazing
thing - a bunch of people alone or in collaboration, building great things
which other people then use to build other ... etc. If we can find a way to
sustain this it would be great.

It is to me absolutely clear to me that Amazon is benefiting from the work
MongoDB has done, and without commensurate compensation. (Is anyone proposing
Amazon does not benefit?) And having watched Microsoft embrace, extend and
extinguish way too successfully, it is at least a concern that the effect of
Amazon's action will be to the long term detriment of MongoDB.

This to me is the problem that must be solved. One possibility is to modify
the OSS model and licenses by creating a distinction between the members of
the community and non-members like Amazon and Apple. If you want to use any
OSS software (with the new license) then you must become a contibuting member
of the community. If you don't want to be a member, then __NO __OSS software
is available to you. In other words, Amazon could not pick and choose which
OSS to use, but only to be a member of the community with all the benefits or
not.

I'm not saying this is the answer, but I am saying this is the problem we need
to solve.

OSS is an ecosystem - one that should and must protect itself from predators.

~~~
cmsj
I see arguments like this a fair bit, and I'd like to explain why I'm not at
all convinced.

Your position is entirely predicated on the assumption that we must protect
Open Source companies above the freedom of users/developers, which does not
fit my beliefs on what FOSS exists to do.

If MongoDB Corp goes away because everyone is using the AWS version, I would
be sad to see an Open Source company end, and would feel bad for the people
who lost their jobs, but I wouldn't rewrite the licenses to be Open Source
Except Big Bad Cloud.

FOSS licenses exist to encode a somewhat overlapping set of moral
philosophies, and if a particular company (or companies) aren't able to
monetise around those philosophies, they have made a strategic mistake of some
kind.

The response to this should not be for the VCs behind these companies to
dilute the essence of FOSS until it can be used to trap users/platforms. That
would lead us to a world where we have replaced the monopolies of proprietary
software with monopsonies for "open source" companies, and I have zero
interest in that world.

~~~
talkingtab
Good points, and I may not have said this well, (and here's the obligatory but
) but... \- I am not proposing to "protect OSS companies over the freedom of
...". Rather I am attempting to explore a way to provide a boundary between
the entire OSS community (users/developers, etc) and those companies that
attempt to exploit that community. As others have pointed out, there are many
companies that make a contribution to open source on a generous basis -
Microsoft, even FaceBook by golly. \- I don't think the distinction there is
"Big Bad Cloud", it is between those who help build and maintain open source
and those who exploit it.

The goal to me is that the people who have created the incredible thing we
call OSS should have a reasonable expectation of sharing in the benefits.

~~~
cmsj
I would love it if more companies would get involved with FOSS communities,
either by sponsoring work, or getting involved directly, but I would still
argue that it's against the spirit of FOSS (and the letter of most licenses)
to try and force them to.

When we choose to put our software out in the world under permissive licenses,
we can't really turn around and complain when people make use of it in ways
that are beneficial to them. On that basis, I object to the use of the word
"exploit" in its negative sense.

Edit: I'd like to add one thought - there are different groups of people who
could benefit by greater engagement from large corporate use of FOSS. Two that
come to mind easily are the funded startups trying to find viable FOSS
business models; I admire their optimism and their goals, and wish them luck.
The second is individuals and small groups who tirelessly maintain incredibly
important things that the rest of us take for granted and have to fight tooth
and nail for every grant, every hour of their own spare time and every hour of
their employer's time, to keep those things going for us. If I have to choose
a group to care about supporting, it's definitely going to be the latter, for
whom I have immense respect, undying gratitude, and sadly insignificant
donations.

~~~
talkingtab
I agree your sentiment in general and especially with the last sentences ...
It is one of the reasons I'm interested in trying to find some way(s) that we
ensure they (the individuals and small groups) have some appropriate reward
and that they are not exploited. I'm really not familiar with mongoDB and I
don't use it, but I suspect that it started out as a person or small group
that grew and grew and helped many people until ...

But perhaps exploit is too strong a word? It certainly seems that at least
Amazon is acting as a bad citizen in this case by taking more than they are
giving back. And it is within the realm of possibility that they will damage
this project - the EEE syndrome is one possibility.

But yes to the respect, gratitude and sadly the insignificant donations as
well.

~~~
mnutt
Not to detract at all from your point, but Mongo (10gen) was very, very well-
funded out of the gate, and the original idea was a platform-as-a-service
built on open source apps before they pivoted to the open source database
idea.

------
dhh2106
I work on an open core business model, and we spend a fair amount of time
thinking about ways to prevent third parties from stealing our lunch.

CockroachDB has an interesting model, where they've tried to closely couple
their open source and premium products. This coupling makes it harder for
third parties to build against the open source and even easier for enterprises
to use it.

Do people here have examples of companies that are taking innovative
approaches to the licensing/OSS question?

~~~
BossingAround
But why did Red Hat succeed then? (this is a genuine question, I'd have
guessed IBM would re-package RH's products, and Oracle failed with their
Unbreakable Linux)

~~~
matwood
To put it succinctly, Red Hat doesn't sell Linux, they sell expertise in
Linux.

~~~
StriverGuy
Arguable this is what MongoDB, Inc. sells as well. A big part of their package
for enterprise clients is optimization and consulting services.

~~~
cpitman
Consulting is not the main driver of Red Hat revenue, the main thing Red Hat
sells is Support.

Support is something enterprise customers want, and they will sign yearly
contracts to get it. In return, if/when they have a production issue, 0-day
vulnerability, etc, they have someone to contact (or may have contacted them!)
to help them resolve the issue. And Red Hat has experts in both support and
engineering, meaning resolution can be anything from a config change to a
rapidly released patch. Happy customers renew year after year.

I work for Red Hat Consulting. This is a very different beast, consulting
involves selling lots of short to medium term projects with the occasional
long project, then trying to optimally staff those projects. You only get
revenue while consultants are on the ground. It's not surprising to me that an
open source company that relies only on consulting wouldn't be sustainable.

------
ojosilva
Mostly FUD of a supposed opensource monetization debacle on the aftermath of
Amazon DocumentDB.

Not every opensource monetization scheme is the same. Mongo and Gitlab are not
the same. One is mission-critical production software, the other is a
productivity tool (which can become critical, but in a different manner), thus
different ways to monetize. Hashicorp, Canonical, Mesosphere and NodeBB are
not nearly the same. Why put everyone on the same pot?

Opensource is not an industry. Opensource is a guarantee, a certificate of
transparency. Opensource is global-scale collaboration. And much more.

Neither is everyone _moving everything_ to fully-managed PaaS, at least not in
the way described by the OP, who assumes a lot of givens there. Many use cloud
infrastructure, but not all the services, some have private clouds or other
hybrid setups.

Application platforms are constantly changing, why now assume Mongo or any
other opensource models are doomed? MongoDB Inc. is a public company and is
perfectly capable of defending their bottom line against a magnificently sized
but over-committed competitor like AWS. Mongo has NOT done a good job with
their PaaS or enterprise tooling so far, competitors have popped up, so now
they have to up their game, that's all.

To underestimate OSS monetization is very presumptuous. To compare musical
recordings, an end to itself, to infrastructure mission-critical software is
downright stupid.

------
dkrich
I don't like the assertion that the only thing that was valuable on CD's was
the convenience, not the music. I'd argue that the copyright itself is the
reason the music industry had pricing power. As everyone knows, they lost the
pricing power with the rise of piracy platforms and it became too costly to
try and keep the market cornered as services like Spotify and Pandora started
to make deals with several labels. At some point the major labels had to throw
their hands up and and capitulate. It's worth noting however, that the most
powerful artists- people like Taylor Swift and Garth Brooks retained their
distribution rights and did not capitulate for a long time. This is further
evidence that the copyright is what creates the shortage that creates the
pricing power.

It's really no different from the pharmaceutical industry. The cost of making
the first pill of a new drug is billions of dollars. The cost of the second is
basically zero. Yet drugs are extremely expensive because the companies that
develop them have complete pricing power for several years because nobody else
is allowed to manufacture that drug.

I think the point he's making whether directly or indirectly, is that MongoDB
made a miscalculation in open sourcing their software at all. I would agree
with that except that one would have to wonder whether there is anything so
unique about MongoDB's software that would enable them to exert much pricing
power. In other words, would MongoDB risen to the level popularity they did if
the software was not open source?

------
tfolbrecht
MongoDB is choosing a dinosaurs business model, and it's going to hurt them
and their ecology.

Mongo the org should play MongoDB like Google does Kubernetes, Golang,
Chromium, etc. Have your people in there, funded, steering the project as
'FOSS' while you release actual products.

Mongo dropped the ball by having no on-ramp product like GCPs Firebase. Their
Cloud provider hate is just a flailing reaction to bad business and
existential fear.

Stop being a crybaby when someone makes a few forms and buttons that spins up
a vm with your DB software running. Of course cloud providers would want a
tight integration with their systems.

Managed Kubernetes on AWS makes k8 stronger, managed Firecracker on GCP and
Azure makes Firecracker stronger.

~~~
alittletooraph
The article mentions that MongoDB already has its own hosted database service,
Atlas.

~~~
tfolbrecht
It does, I've used it, I even have the socks, but it's a managed Database
product. It's not equivalent to Firebase, AWS Lightsail, Digital Ocean One-
click, etc. So a new MERN developer isn't going to gravitate toward that.

It's more like AWS RDS for MongoDB.

~~~
fwiw1
[https://www.mongodb.com/cloud/stitch](https://www.mongodb.com/cloud/stitch)

------
ig1
I think Stratchery made a mistake in think this is about open vs closed
source, but rather it's down to Amazon's desire to own core infrastructure.

Amazon wants to have an offering in every major database category. Whether
you're open source or closed source, it's safe to assume if you get decent
marketshare Amazon will come after you.

Even if MongoDB was proprietary Amazon would have built a competitor in this
space.

------
manigandham
This whole thing is a race as software itself gets better and better. Just
think about how hard it was to run things 5 years ago before the rapid rise of
containers and orchestrators. One person with Kubernetes can easily run a
large cluster with hundreds of applications, even with private owned hardware.
And this is all free now.

Being ahead of the curve with proprietary products is a viable business _but
just not as big_ as these companies want it to be. Meanwhile there are
thousands of smaller boutique software firms solving problems and making great
profits.

------
nwhatt
Why can't MongoDB can't compete with AWS? Aside from cloud vendor lock-in, and
economies of scale that AWS has. Curious if anyone here has experience with
hosting using Mongo's enterprise offering. The article makes the point that
Amazon is targeting a lower version of the API, can't the enterprise version
compete on features?

~~~
duggan
Other than multi-document transactions, many of the changes to MongoDB since
3.6 are to do with performance and scaling - this is AWS' bread and butter.

Something to consider is how many applications depends on cutting edge
database features. Developers often consider a database an object persistence
mechanism whose details are to be tidied away. See, for example, the emphasis
on database portability in ORMs.

MongoDB's most effective enterprise offering is support, in my opinion. They
know their database well, which can make a big difference if your company is
heavily reliant on it.

I suspect for many users though, AWS support will be good enough. Presumably,
that's the danger to MongoDB.

~~~
merlynn
In the spirit of complete transparency, I work at MongoDB. Depending on users'
specific needs and the features of MongoDB they use, the differences could go
quite a bit further than 'just' support. Some of the important differences to
keep in mind include regional availability and approaches to resiliency (Atlas
allows you to scale beyond a single node and offers multi-region clusters;
DocumentDB limits you to a single primary), role-based access control
(DocumentDB currently only supports user that has full access to all databases
in a cluster; MongoDB allows fine-grained control), freedom from vendor lock-
in (With MongoDB you can always choose to host your own clusters whereas
DocumentDB does not afford you this option). These are only a few of the
differences between the hosting platforms, on top of that, you would, of
course, be limited to an incomplete set of features
([https://docs.aws.amazon.com/documentdb/latest/developerguide...](https://docs.aws.amazon.com/documentdb/latest/developerguide/mongo-
apis.html)) compared to MongoDB 3.6 and you would be missing out on
improvements available in MongoDB 4.0 and future versions.

------
kevinAtStorj
I find it interesting that the price of storage has essentially flatlined for
the past five years, although the cost of hard drives have decreased by about
50 percent over that same timeframe dollar-per-gigabyte
([https://www.forbes.com/sites/tomcoughlin/2017/12/20/digital-...](https://www.forbes.com/sites/tomcoughlin/2017/12/20/digital-
storage-projections-for-2018-part-1/#41e9a3a13a20)).

Innovations at the 'business' layer may be the best way to compete with AWS,
in the way that it captures a large chunk of value generated through OSS.
Decentralized cloud platforms essentially take the principles of open source
and apply them to the very infrastructure on which software runs.

At Storj, for example, we have an Open Source Partner Program that attempts to
solve the ‘Amazon Problem’ by enabling any open source project to generate
revenue every time their end users store data in the cloud.

Storj tracks usage on the network and returns a significant portion of the
revenue earned when data from an open source project is stored on the
platform. Critically, this enables open source projects to derive sustainable
revenue from usage, whether by commercial customers or non-paying open source
users.

In my opinion, this can help drive and support the next wave of Open Source
monetization models (essentially through this concept of 'Commoditize Your
Complement" \- where the complement is cloud consumption)

~~~
AmericanChopper
Perhaps this is a good idea in theory, but it’s lacking in implementation.
Having used Storj in the past, I’ve found it to be the least reliable service
I’ve ever used. The SLA excludes events beyond your control, which sadly
includes the availability of your storage network. I wouldn’t say this
solution is even close to being production ready.

~~~
kevinStorj
Storj has spent the last year rebuilding the entire network after hiring JT
Olio (Director of Engineering) Ben Golub (Interim CEO, previously CEO of
Docker).

The V3 Network is leaps and bounds more performant and economical than the V2
Network. It is compatible with the S3 bucket-object store and is an easy shift
for applications already using S3 as an object store layer. You can speed test
it vs S3 using the ./cmd/s3-benchmark tool in our distro.

Try it out for yourself: [https://storj.io/blog/2019/01/getting-started-with-
the-storj...](https://storj.io/blog/2019/01/getting-started-with-the-
storj-v3-test-network-storj-sdk/)

------
benologist
Amazon has for years been stealing from merchants on their platform and AWS is
just another part of their platform. They are everything we caution people
against when they depend on a single API like being a superfluous Twitter
client getting crushed, just a much, much larger API.

In Mongo's unfortunate case they couldn't stop people from deploying to EC2
before Amazon determined it was worth stealing, but it doesn't even have to be
software you use on EC2 it can be your software too.

They copy products from third party vendors selling on Amazon -

[https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-09-27/amazon-s-...](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-09-27/amazon-
s-copy-cat-products-targeted-as-eu-quizzes-smaller-rivals)

[http://fortune.com/2016/04/20/amazon-copies-
merchants/](http://fortune.com/2016/04/20/amazon-copies-merchants/)

They even copy SaaS hosted on AWS if the number are good -

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

~~~
zby
[Meta warning] This comment is being downvoted because of the incendiary
language, but it is actually quite insightful. I wish the author changed some
of the words used :(

------
merlynn
Michael from MongoDB here. Amazon, Microsoft, and Google are certainly big
players in this field, and common wisdom is that they are best qualified to
scale, but in this case, we have a clear counterexample. DocumentDB clusters
are limited to a single region of AWS. MongoDB Atlas clusters can span the
entire globe with low-latency reads and writes in multiple regions. In terms
of pricing, DocumentDB is cheaper when you choose to go with 2 instances. AWS
achieves this by shifting high availability to the storage layer which in turn
means that any failover could require between 1 and 2 minutes to happen - this
compares to seconds that this would take with MongoDB Atlas. If you go with
the default DocumentDB configuration and use 3 instances you end up paying a
premium between 20-35%. With this in mind, it really depends on your use case
whether DocumentDB ends up being cheaper for you. In terms of reliability and
the hosting service is global, Atlas currently outperforms DocumentDB.

------
throw2016
This discussion is new because AWS and others are new and growing rapidly and
it's a huge mistake to conflate it with conventional discussions and
strategies about open source.

The threat is not just to open source but also entire categories of software
and hardware.

The situation is so dire that you may create a product that does 10Gbs or
something else and AWS offers 5Gbs but with automatic snapshots, high
availability, scalability and distributed out of the box, and because of ease
of use, access, near free management and scale users will still prefer AWS and
your market will be limited to a extremely tiny subset requiring some specific
niche and willing to configure, roll it out and maintain on their own.

This completely changes the incentives to create, because to compete you now
need to create a 'cloud native' product that leverages AWS and other clouds.
Which means a transformation of traditional open source and entire categories
of software as we understand them to something new.

------
z3t4
How easy is it to migrate to or away from a cloud service like AWS ? I think
the end-game for these cloud giants is to lock you in, so that you simply
can't switch to a commodity provider.

~~~
sokoloff
When we embarked on our migration _into_ AWS, we thought about this pretty
carefully. There wasn't _anything_ that we couldn't move in a year. That
provides a sufficient backstop (IMO) to anything becoming untenable in the AWS
ecosystem. Most everything could be moved in a handful of weeks of effort, or
at least enough parts to achieve the reason to move.

AWS is still in a battle for market share; I think they're extremely
"friendly" to their customers at this phase of the game. Will that change in a
half-decade or decade? Maybe, but I think they're earning their profits now
and likely to continue to do so.

~~~
geggam
At scale you need to move out of the cloud. Once you hit a certain point there
is no economic gain.

~~~
sokoloff
That is almost surely true at extreme scale. The interesting question is
whether that's true for 0.1%, 1%, or 5% of companies. (I think it's on the
lower end of that range somewhere, provided the 5% scale cases are willing to
be smart about their hybrid strategy.)

~~~
geggam
Was at a startup around 2k nodes in AWS. Bill was over 400K on average a
month.

When purchasing RI I saw 800K a month.

~~~
mooreds
> When purchasing RI I saw 800K a month.

I don't understand. Can you please clarify?

~~~
geggam
When buying reserved instances ( 3 year reserved ) the normal 400k spend was
doubled to 800 thousand that month

~~~
mooreds
Ah, thanks. What was the monthly spend after the RI purchase?

------
zby
How would it be different if whole of MongoDB had a proprietary license?
Amazon would do the same thing with the same effect.

Open Source is a red herring here - the problem is with selling software when
AWS sells “performance, scalability, and availability.”

~~~
manigandham
It's unlikely that the product would have as much usage in the first place to
get any attention, nor would the protocol be open-source for AWS to host or
build its own version. That's a critical difference compared to proprietary
software, in which case AWS would be a customer and the vendor would be just
fine.

~~~
zby
Why would AWS be a customer if Mongo was entirely proprietary and not when it
is mostly Open Source?

~~~
manigandham
Because open-source is free, that's the big difference. Why would they pay for
something they don't have to? There's barely anything in the enterprise
edition that's worth paying for, especially when most of it is operations
tools that AWS doesn't need.

~~~
zby
If it was proprietary it would not be free - why should they pay then and not
now? I am arguing that they would not, just like they don't now - there is no
difference. The problem is with selling software - not with Open Source, if it
was entirely Open Source - then they would not have to pay and they would use
it.

~~~
manigandham
What? If it's proprietary or closed source then the clouds have pay for to
legally offer it to their customers. They can't just steal it without paying.

This is extremely common. How do you think Windows, SQL Server, Oracle, Redhat
Linux, Spark Enterprise, Cloudera/Hortonworks, and lots of other products are
offered by the clouds?

If there's enough demand for proprietary software then the clouds will do a
licensing deal directly with the vendor, however MongoDB gave away too much of
the product as open-source so there's no reason to pay them. That's the
problem. The other issue is that if it was never open-source then nobody might
even be using it in the first place, so it's a hard balance.

~~~
zby
If it is proprietary they don't have to pay - they can always write their own
- just like it happend in this case. If it is economic to write their own now
- it would also be economic to write their own when Mongo was entirely
proprietary. There is no economic difference in these two situations. But
maybe you believe that it was not economy that dictated the rewrite - but
rather it was a kind of tantrum - "others can have it for free why can't
we!!!???". I don't think it was an emotional decision.

~~~
manigandham
If that was feasible then they would already have SQL Server and Oracle APIs
offered using their own tech instead of buying other vendors. Aurora MySQL and
PostgreSQL still uses the open-source code layer on the top and just switches
out the storage engines, and it's most likely the same here by using parts of
actual MongoDB with a different storage engine.

~~~
zby
Isn't the MongoDB code covered by their Server Side license [1]? AWS could not
use this legally.

1\. [https://www.mongodb.com/blog/post/mongodb-now-released-
under...](https://www.mongodb.com/blog/post/mongodb-now-released-under-the-
server-side-public-license)

------
philipswood
I'm surprised utility-based software pricing isn't being pursued more. The
cloud providers are the natural point to bill.

Currently they sell computing resources wholesale to others who then somehow
need to monetize it. (I mean raw cycles, storage and bandwidth are worthless
_on their own_ )

As a software user, paying a simple usage-based fee that includes compute,
storage and software fees would be ideal.

As a cloud provider having people develop product that could be used to sell
their own base product _at no development risk of their own_ would be
advantageous.

Also as a software development group not having to deal with the complexities
of scaling the platform can have advantages.

------
lettergram
The next open source model I see being successful is one which open sources
it’s code, but keeps models proprietary.

Say I build a system for detecting of pigs leave their pen. Open sourcing it
lets people build models for sheep, cows, and chickens. With resources I
improve those models and provide additional tuning for onsite locations. There
is an open source solution with code and community models, but I provide an
“accuracy guaranteed”, upgrades, and maintainence.

We can even lease the hardware (cameras, field GPU boxes, etc.), want a new
model for kids in a school yard, no problem! I’ll do that for you, it’ll be
$100k and I retain rights to the model.

------
shmerl
_> No, they are still not selling music; in fact, they are beating piracy at
its own game: the music industry is selling convenience. Get nearly any piece
of recorded music ever made, for a mere $10/month._

I find it more convenient, to have a DRM-free backup of the music I paid for.
Sure, streaming is useful, but not when it's available in the form of rent
only. That's why I'm using Bandcamp and not Spotify.

------
javajosh
Is it possible to let people use software freely, but if they make money from
a service that uses it, you have to pay for it? This seems to me to be the
fairest approach, particularly in a hosted environment. Think of something
like codepen.io but instead of premium pricing they only charge you when you
process payments. In a way, this is what the App Store and Play Store are
already doing, no?

~~~
opencl
Unreal engine charges 5% royalty for projects using it (waived for the first
$3k/quarter).

------
privateSFacct
My question - how badly did Amazon get burnt by using Oracle?

In databases in particular Amazon seems to be on a huge kick to not have to
pay anyone else. Even if they end up with a bunch of quasi-overlapping
products (SimpleDB, DynamoDB, MongoDB) they just seem very aggressive here. At
this rate they are going to have 10+ database offerings in the future.

~~~
callumjones
It's easier for AWS for accommodate all their customer's needs (MySQL,
MongoDB, Postgres) and reduce the cost of switching than it is to convince
them to rewrite an application or legacy application to leverage say DynamoDB.
The benefit of DynamoDB is great, but it's just one slice of the computing
pie.

------
rglover
Open source works if you:

\- Treat your OSS projects like MARKETING tools, not revenue streams.

\- Offer a freemium version of what you produce (e.g., offering a "Pro"
version that's well-maintained and adds valuable features).

\- Back your projects with services (e.g., consulting, fast support, "off the
shelf" implementations, enterprise workshops, etc.).

\- Back your projects with paid support.

\- Scale your performance expectations of the business to the cash flow of
your services.

If you want to make money off of OSS, you have to run a business. It's the
responsibility of the project's creators to deliver products and services
utilizing their technology to provide something better than others can (and
charge for it).

Otherwise, keep it closed source.

~~~
julianlam
Indeed, that is NodeBB's business model (and the same model as many other
forum software companies, come to think of it).

We provide fast support to anyone that wants it, and peace of mind to
companies that utilise our product. We are, in essence, domain knowledge as a
service.

Many people have tried to undercut us, which is a great way of keeping us
honest, but there's nothing quite like getting support from the guys who wrote
the software :)

My only regret is that I cannot support everyone who wants to use NodeBB, for
a price point accessible to all.

------
robotsquidward
I'm the furthest thing from a lawyer, but wouldn't it be nice to say my
software is open source, and you can use it in your software, but if the
software product you're selling with my software in it is making over $X, you
have to pay $X?

Or, even more generally, is there a legal way to protect your code from being
taken advantage of by the top 1% of companies? Could that become popular?

If I help a million developers and companies make money, fine, but it is
immensely frustrating how the Amazons and Googles of the world reap so much of
the benefit.

------
Beltiras
I don't see why big companies like Google, AWS and the like wouldn't fund open
source development, precisely because they have realized great returns using
those softwares to reap monetary benefit. If I were a CEO and my core business
was built on OSS, I would allocate budget to help the projects used within my
organization. It's just common sense to do so. Reality might be different but
then that makes for some really short sighted decision making on behalf of
those companies.

~~~
boulos
Disclosure: I work on Google Cloud.

Actually, we do precisely this. Google contributes heavily to Linux, KVM,
LLVM, and so on in addition to the open source projects we launched (Android,
Chromium, Kubernetes to name some popular ones).

Our marketing team decided to highlight this on
[https://cloud.google.com/open-cloud/](https://cloud.google.com/open-cloud/)
which does an okay job. Feedback welcome, and I’ll pass it along to them.

~~~
Beltiras
That's very good. Does Google also donate money to OSS projects they use?
Postgres? Redis? uWSGI? Gunicorn? MySQL? I'd imagine they are heavily used in
many projects within Google.

~~~
infinite8s
They aren't used.

~~~
cmsj
Google definitely uses MySQL (e.g.
[https://www.mysql.com/customers/view/?id=555](https://www.mysql.com/customers/view/?id=555))
and offers a MySQL deployment/management as a Service in GCloud. No idea what,
if any, their contributions back to upstream have been, but I know they've
been using it for important internal stuff for years, so I would be very
surprised if, at the very least, no patches have come from out from the
chocolate factory doors.

~~~
mrep
Google built and open sourced an entire horizontal scaling cluster management
system for MySQL: [https://vitess.io/](https://vitess.io/)

------
saranshk
Amazon has had a documented past of taking massively successful Open Source
projects and adding their own bells and whistles to it and upselling them.

Amazon is the new Microsoft.

------
sebringj
So its like Mongo is being eaten by AWS in terms of its service offerings
after it gains mindshare as DocumentDB is essentially a swap-out replacement
for larger companies. That somehow smells to me as it erodes funding from its
foundation in some way. I don't know.

~~~
merlynn
Michael here from MongoDB - We're currently still running tests on users
ability to change from MongoDB to DocumentDB. It may not be quite as simple as
exporting and reimporting the data. Many features present in MongoDB 3.6 do
not work in DocumentDB
([https://docs.aws.amazon.com/documentdb/latest/developerguide...](https://docs.aws.amazon.com/documentdb/latest/developerguide/mongo-
apis.html)). Preliminary test results show that DocumenDB is closer to MongoDB
2.0 in its features (with some exceptions). That means people that choose to
switch over will have to find workarounds and change their code to work with
DocumentDB. We'll be releasing our analysis on this soon with more
information.

~~~
sebringj
That is definitely not good for my needs. I'll be sticking to Atlas over
DocumentDB or simply plain Mongo latest. Thank you for the comment.

------
sytse
The 'Why Software Should Be Free' case assumes the software exists at all. I
think this is the case for a lot of common infrastructure software and I think
these will continue to move to open source.

But without a license payment much software might not be available at all.

------
dcbadacd
Maybe the proper way to fund open-source is just governments, altruistic
companies and users, not selling? To some extent all of those already happen
but growing so slowly, funded open-source software % growth could be sped up.

------
rahilb
Everybody follows

Speedy bits exchange

Stars await to gl@ow"

The preceding key is copyrighted by Oracle Corporation.

Dupl@ication of this key is not allowed without permission from Oracl1e
Corporation.

Copyright 2003 Oracle Corporation.

------
jayd16
I thought the speculation was that DocumentDB was running on postgres and its
just the API that's compatible. Open source might have played a roll but
wouldn't this move from amazon be just as possible with a closed source API?

~~~
tjungblut
I thought so too, it's similar on how BigTable also supports the HBase APIs.

------
jillesvangurp
The economic reality of building software is that it is enormously expensive.
Yes, you could develop your own operating system, compiler, UI frameworks,
databases, etc. Or you could use something that already exists and works and
focus on creating something new instead. You'll never get around to building
something new if you first have to reinvent countless wheels.

That's why there are only a handful of widely used operating systems, many of
which are Linux based at this point and all of which depend on many small OSS
components. It just takes too much effort to get to the same level of
functionality. The two notable exceptions are Apple and Microsoft that both
choose to maintain their decades long investments in their respective software
stacks. Even Microsoft has recently joined the club and is now doing open
source openly. Sound economics and it has done wonders for their valuation.

Another reality with software is that its value decreases over time. It
inevitably becomes a commodity. Design, algorithms, and successful features
find their way to competing products and inevitably one of them gets
distributed under a very permissive license. As that happens, the way to
differentiate and stay valuable (and relevant) is to improve what you do, how
you do it, and how well you do it.

This is the economic problem MongoDB is facing: their added value is tanking
and they felt they needed to make their already quite restrictive license even
less permissive to be able to get more revenue from their users. This makes
the product harder to use commercially unless you pay (which is intentional).
However, this causes people to look for alternative solutions and causes many
of them to find their way to competing products.

The predictable result: several competing products now offer more or less drop
in replacement functionality with most or all of the technical features that
made MongoDB so cool just a few years ago. Amazon just capitalized on that by
launching their own (closed source) product.

The long term economic success of OSS is tied to its development community.
This requires ongoing investments to happen. An OSS community is usually not a
single company that owns the software but the collective of users and
developers of the software that together 'own' the software and derive value
from it. There are certain types of software projects out there that are so
essential to so many companies that they thrive for decades and are pushed
forward by companies and people pooling resources through donations, active
contributions, etc.

This requires a pragmatic attitude to licensing. We just saw frenemies Google
and MS join forces around chrome. That is not charity: they both have a big
enough economic stake in that project to put their differences aside (which
are considerable). The licenses are key to facilitating such communities
between mutually distrusting entities like that. It fundamentally has to
facilitate the software can be used freely by anyone; that is the basis for
collaboration.

------
gaius
The irony is that MongoDB brought this on themselves. They created a market
for “like MongoDB, but reliable and secure” but were unable to deliver it
themselves.

~~~
alittletooraph
MongoDB has a fully managed service called MongoDB Atlas that runs on AWS (and
Azure, GCP).

------
bobm_kite9
I'll be interested to see what Jepsen[1] makes of this. MongoDB traditionally
lost a lot of data when there was a split-brain in the network. According to
the post, AWS is a re-implementation of MongoDB v3. Will Amazon's
implementation fare any better?

[1]: [https://aphyr.com/posts/284-call-me-maybe-
mongodb](https://aphyr.com/posts/284-call-me-maybe-mongodb)

~~~
merlynn
Michael here from MongoDB - I can't answer your question about DocumentDB and
Jepsen, but there is a more recent analysis from Jepsen:
[https://jepsen.io/analyses/mongodb-3-4-0-rc3](https://jepsen.io/analyses/mongodb-3-4-0-rc3).
DocumentDB is built on Aurora, so the architecture is completely different.

