19 ms·

AWS gives open source the middle finger?

332 points by uji 8y ago

callumjones 8y ago
Where was the outrage when they implemented the MySQL and Postgres interfaces on Aurora?
- buremba 8y ago
  They're basically killing a company behind an open-source project.
  - swish_bob 8y ago
    Behind a _formerly_ open-source project.
techslave 8y ago
https://outline.com/yaGmcz https://outline.com/yaGmcz so you don’t have to visit techscum
Pfhreak 8y ago
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.
- notyourwork 8y ago
  Every company has the same attitude in my experience, this ins't unique to Amazon. edit: For those down voting instead of just disagreeing provide a company and their policy. All the companies I've worked at have been the same as Amazon more or less and all my friends have similar employment clauses.
  - Pfhreak 8y ago
    Amazon reserved the right to take ownership of my project and all related IP at any time (including after leaving the company.) I was also forbidden from working with anyone outside of my org on the projects. There were no exceptions allowed. It was considerably more restrictive than any company I've worked at elsewhere.
    - notyourwork 8y ago
      I'm aware of Amazon's policies. Most companies have similar clauses.
      - Pfhreak 8y ago
        I disagree. My research suggested that Amazon's policies about open source and game development were stricter. (For example, I must be willing to disclose any sales data to Amazon. I must use Amazon products when possible. I must make my project available on the Amazon store if possible.) Most companies also have a process to keep copyright if you need/want to. Yes, most companies have approval processes. They might even be onerous approvals processes. Amazon expressly forbid me from participating in game jams with people who were not in my org.
        Galanwe 8y ago
        >I disagree. My research suggested that Amazon's policies about open source and game development were stricter. Worked at microsoft for 2 years, there are the same policies. It was not contractual though. It's just that there were notes broadcasted saying that whenever you discussed with third parties, you should use microsoft tools if possible. Want to meet someone? Send a Bing Maps link, not Google Maps. Want to share a research? Send a Bing Link, not a Google search. etc. As for the confidentiality clauses, I work in finance, and the rules on IP and personal projects are the same as what you describe.
        MRD85 8y ago
- spectre256 8y ago
  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 8y ago
    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.
    - int_19h 8y ago
      Microsoft doesn't. You're only required to get pre-approval in case of conflicts of interest.
      - saagarjha 8y ago
        > You're only required to get pre-approval in case of conflicts of interest. Given the extremely diverse set of things that Microsoft works on, much of which is likely done without you being disclosed on it, how can you be sure that your project is not a conflict of interest?
        tallanvor 8y ago
        Conflict of interest = something you are directly involved with at work, or potentially worked on for the company previously. For example, if you're on the SQL Server team then contributing to SQLLite would reasonably be considered a conflict of interest, but contributions to the Linux kernel wouldn't be.
        8y ago
- tanilama 8y ago
  Amazon is really a frugal company, in a sense they want every penny they spend on you to evetually make it back to their pockets.
  - raxxorrax 8y ago
    Always judge a company by how they treat their lowest employees. And since people at Amazon having difficulties trying to find time to take a piss, it doesn't really qualify as an employer for me personally. I like their services in AWS-land and they have really good solutions. They probably treat their developers better as long as they can be exploited. But if there is another service with comparable features, I generally don't have to think very long.
    - goldenkey 8y ago
      I worked there too in 2015. The culture is toxic. The most surprising thing was the way all the AWS services are built with a grab bag of different teams with entirely different languages, copying CSS and code all over the place. There were no real standards. I still like AWS but knowing how bad the sausage is made makes me cringe a bit...
      - akhilcacharya 8y ago
        I mean...if it performs well all of that is irrelevant to the customer.
        h1d 8y ago
        While it works.
    - michaelt 8y ago
      Always judge a company by how they treat their lowest employees. Seems like a policy that gives a big advantage to industries that aren't labour-intensive. Is Costco a worse company than Oracle, because the former has employees making $30,000 and the latter doesn't?
- flukus 8y ago
  > especially if you were thinking about working on a game Why games especially? That seems to be the one area the would be absolutely free of any conflict of interest with amazon.
  - Pfhreak 8y ago
    Amazon has a game studio producing games. They've publicly announced Breakaway, New World, and Crucible as three titles. Why games are different than other areas (e.g. why aren't web services called out separately with their own policy while games are? I'm not sure.)
    - throwaway1280 8y ago
      Yeah, it's really weird. Amazon has other IP-producing divisions, and even though Amazon Studios is very powerful, there's nothing preventing people from making their own video content. I wonder if it's just down to whoever leads that game studio pushing for such a rule.
  - Zarel 8y ago
    I imagine it has to do with Amazon Lumberyard: https://aws.amazon.com/lumberyard/ https://aws.amazon.com/lumberyard/
- yesenadam 8y ago
  I just now started reading Merritt's Adventure in Prolog (1990), and the very beginning seems somehow relevant to this thread: "I was working for an aerospace company in the early 1970s when someone got a copy of the original Adventure game and installed it on our mainframe computer. For the next month my lunch hours, evenings and weekends, as well as normal work hours, were consumed with fighting the fierce green dragon and escaping from the twisty little passages. Finally, with a few hints about the plover's egg and dynamite, I had proudly earned all the points in the game. My elation turned to terror as I realized it was time for my performance review. My boss was a stern man, more comfortable with machines than people. He opened up a large computer printout containing a log of hours each programmer spent on the mainframe computer. He said he noticed that recently I had been working evenings and weekends and that he admired that type of dedication in his employees. He gave me the maximum raise and told me to keep up the good work."
- StreamBright 8y ago
  In the US, right? You can't do such a thing in the EU.
  - troist 8y ago
    Have you got a source on that? Not questioning that it does sound like an EU thing, but it could come in handy at my current company if there's legislation on that and I can't seem to find any.
    - StreamBright 8y ago
      It is different country by country. In some countries if it wasn't done on a company equipment regarding your assignments the company cannot do anything about it and they cannot limit you to work on opensource/unpaid projects.
  - camtarn 8y ago
    I worked for Amazon in the EU, and the rule was certainly in force. Whether or not it could be enforced is a different question, but none of us wanted to go up against Amazon's lawyers!
    - StreamBright 8y ago
      Amazon EU companies tend to follow blindly what is coming from the HQ. I personally experienced this. After warned the management about getting the ministry of employment involved they immediately backed down and let us implement something according to the EU law. It is the matter of knowing your position and the law.
- mabbo 8y ago
  The policies really used to be extreme. I'm still on the inside and I will say things have dramatically improved in the last couple years.
- glenngillen 8y ago
  I work at AWS. I have also been working on a game in my spare time. I don't know when you left but there are currently zero issues in these two things co-existing. Pretty standard requirements to make sure there's a clear separation of responsibilities and that you're not working on the game when you're meant to be at work, etc.
techslave 8y ago
not sure this is worth the controversial title. good on amazon.
notyourwork 8y ago
> “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 8y ago
  For what it's worth when it comes to choosing a hosted ElasticSearch provider I would go to Elastic over AWS Elasticsearch Service.
  - notyourwork 8y ago
    Interesting, as someone considering using AWS ES for an upcoming project I'd love to hear more about your experience.
    - ratling 8y ago
      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.
cperciva 8y ago
Seems to me that Mongo gave AWS the middle finger two years ago.
- koolba 8y ago
  What happened two years ago?
  - whoisjuan 8y ago
    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 8y ago
      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-public-license-for-mongodb-community-server https://www.mongodb.com/press/mongodb-issues-new-server-side...
  - cperciva 8y ago
    Oops, you're right -- the license change was more recent than that. I don't know why I was thinking that it was two years ago.
joelbondurant 8y ago
Duh, AWS's entire business model is strategically engineered dependency on closed source tooling.
fogetti 8y ago
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 8y ago
  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 8y ago
    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).
- yjftsjthsd-h 8y ago
  You found it disgusting that a software vendor decided to implement features in order to match competitors in the space? That's... how product development works.
  - fogetti 8y ago
    That's just the tip of the iceberg. I am not gonna repeat myself. Read my previous comments on the topic.
nemothekid 8y ago
>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 8y ago
  How credible techcrunch should be considered a reliable journalism source here? This one smells pretty much like a money article
  - tomnipotent 8y ago
    TechCrunch lost credibility a loooong time ago (well before being sold to AOL). It's safe to ignore any drivel it publishes.
  - Aramgutang 8y ago
    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.
- denisvlr 8y ago
  It’s clearly presented as a quote from mongoDB’s CEO.
  - jhanschoo 8y ago
    The quote tickles me because in earlier days MongoDB's choice of defaults gave it a reputation as a poor imitation of a reliable document store.
_cs2017_ 8y ago
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 8y ago
  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 8y ago
    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 8y ago
      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 8y ago
        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)
int_19h 8y ago
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 8y ago
  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.
  - zodiac 8y ago
    Even assuming that AWS adds no value, what exactly is wrong with offering a "no value added" hosting service and charging for it?
    - bonzini 8y ago
      In fact hosting is already a value added, or no one would use it.
  - robbyt 8y ago
    Realistically, I think that a large portion of that 300M went to sales and marketing at MongoDB... However, I agree with everything else you said.
ilovecaching 8y ago
> "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 8y ago
  Firecracker? That was a big one to me.
  - whoisjuan 8y ago
    Correto too.
- plandis 8y ago
  https://amzn.github.io https://amzn.github.io has all of the various open source projects Amazon has created
crb002 8y ago
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.
peterwwillis 8y ago
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
- arbie 8y ago
  > Could have gotten free fixes from the biggest lab in the world Wasn't this one of the main points of contention, though, in addition to not purchasing a commerical license? Amazon not upstreaming (m)any of the fixes?
  - peterwwillis 8y ago
    I don't know, it's certainly possible. But at least there was the opportunity, as they have upstreamed fixes for other projects. And it's not like keeping the fixes private was hurting anyone (unless they're security fixes; I think modern licenses should require all security bugs at least be reported, in the absence of changesets)
Lazare 8y ago
That's a very tendentious title.
bradrydzewski 8y ago
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).
- paulddraper 8y ago
  You're absolutely right. AWS is not known to move that fast (though they are known to move faster if they think the competition is outpacing them). This undoubtedly had been in the works as Aurora for MongoDB. The timing is suspect, sure. But one look at Aurora for MySQL and Aurora for PostgreSQL will tell you that AWS would've gotten around to it regardless of licensing.
- threeseed 8y ago
  Reverse engineering the MongoDB API, getting it to work on Aurora storage engine, verifying existing CLI/drivers work and having it all scaleable and supportable. At least a few months work there. Even for Amazon.
- robbyt 8y ago
  Lawyers move slower than software engineers. There could have been years of exchanges between the company prior to this.
- maximilianburke 8y ago
  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".
- athrun 8y ago
  Difficult to know for sure, but it's probable that MongoDB made Amazon aware that they would introduce such a licensing change, in a bid to put pressure on AWS and get them to contract with MongoDB. It didn't work.
tobyjsullivan 8y ago
"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 8y ago
  where art thou dang to come help us?
bwb 8y ago
Stupid title for the article. Inflammatory and I bet tc got some eyeballs.
exabrial 8y ago
It's mongodb though... It's well documented at this point you shouldn't be using mongo on anything that matters
- threeseed 8y ago
  And yet many of us are using it in Production. Including companies like Adobe, eBay, Expedia, Sony etc.
  - pritambaral 8y ago
    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 8y ago
      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.
      - macintux 8y ago
        There are use cases where losing data is an acceptable tradeoff, particularly if the database is not the system of record.
      - erik_seaberg 8y ago
        A reckless enough design (e.g., returning success when a request is merely buffered at the client) can lose writes without telling you that it lost writes, which won't affect its popularity among users who don't audit for that.
      - pritambaral 8y ago
kerng 8y ago
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 8y ago
  Is this comment supposed to be irony?
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
socrateslee 8y ago
Scaling mongodb is not easy, and may this is why AWS DocumentDB is built instead of providing an RDS version of mongodb?
hannob 8y ago
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.
VvR-Ox 8y ago
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 8y ago
  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?
toyg 8y ago
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 8y ago
  > 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 8y ago
    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.
    - geezerjay 8y ago
      > Because they have money Seriously?
      - toyg 8y ago
holografix 8y ago
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 8y ago
  > 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 8y ago
    > 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.
justinjlynn 8y ago
> 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.
SergeAx 8y ago
Implementing MongoDB API is something like implementing SQL language, doesn't it? Plus communication protocol with auth, of course.
throw2016 8y ago
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 8y ago
  > 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.
cobbzilla 8y ago
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.
benologist 8y ago
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 8y ago
  >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 8y ago
    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 8y ago
      Thanks - I suspected you were saying as much. MongoDB aside, can you share examples of this process?
      - benologist 8y ago
        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_partner_products/ https://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/03/08/amazon_copies_partn... I think you can add Heroku (AWS Beanstalk) even before that.
jgowdy 8y ago
"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?
Sir_Cmpwn 8y ago
>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 8y ago
  Mongo was AGPL, not Apache 2. It seems unlikely Amazon was willing to integrate an AGPL code into AWS.
  - Sir_Cmpwn 8y ago
    My bad, thanks for clarifying.
talkingtab 8y ago
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.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
perseusprime11 8y ago
RIP MongoDB
cmmartin 8y ago
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 8y ago
  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/faq#implications https://www.mongodb.com/licensing/server-side-public-license... 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.

332 points by uji 8y ago

callumjones 8y ago

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

buremba 8y ago
They're basically killing a company behind an open-source project.
- swish_bob 8y ago
  Behind a _formerly_ open-source project.

techslave 8y ago

https://outline.com/yaGmcz https://outline.com/yaGmcz so you don’t have to visit techscum

Pfhreak 8y ago

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.

notyourwork 8y ago
Every company has the same attitude in my experience, this ins't unique to Amazon. edit: For those down voting instead of just disagreeing provide a company and their policy. All the companies I've worked at have been the same as Amazon more or less and all my friends have similar employment clauses.
- Pfhreak 8y ago
  Amazon reserved the right to take ownership of my project and all related IP at any time (including after leaving the company.) I was also forbidden from working with anyone outside of my org on the projects. There were no exceptions allowed. It was considerably more restrictive than any company I've worked at elsewhere.
  - notyourwork 8y ago
    I'm aware of Amazon's policies. Most companies have similar clauses.
    - Pfhreak 8y ago
      I disagree. My research suggested that Amazon's policies about open source and game development were stricter. (For example, I must be willing to disclose any sales data to Amazon. I must use Amazon products when possible. I must make my project available on the Amazon store if possible.) Most companies also have a process to keep copyright if you need/want to. Yes, most companies have approval processes. They might even be onerous approvals processes. Amazon expressly forbid me from participating in game jams with people who were not in my org.
      - Galanwe 8y ago
        >I disagree. My research suggested that Amazon's policies about open source and game development were stricter. Worked at microsoft for 2 years, there are the same policies. It was not contractual though. It's just that there were notes broadcasted saying that whenever you discussed with third parties, you should use microsoft tools if possible. Want to meet someone? Send a Bing Maps link, not Google Maps. Want to share a research? Send a Bing Link, not a Google search. etc. As for the confidentiality clauses, I work in finance, and the rules on IP and personal projects are the same as what you describe.
        MRD85 8y ago
spectre256 8y ago
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 8y ago
  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.
  - int_19h 8y ago
    Microsoft doesn't. You're only required to get pre-approval in case of conflicts of interest.
    - saagarjha 8y ago
      > You're only required to get pre-approval in case of conflicts of interest. Given the extremely diverse set of things that Microsoft works on, much of which is likely done without you being disclosed on it, how can you be sure that your project is not a conflict of interest?
      - tallanvor 8y ago
        Conflict of interest = something you are directly involved with at work, or potentially worked on for the company previously. For example, if you're on the SQL Server team then contributing to SQLLite would reasonably be considered a conflict of interest, but contributions to the Linux kernel wouldn't be.
        8y ago
tanilama 8y ago
Amazon is really a frugal company, in a sense they want every penny they spend on you to evetually make it back to their pockets.
- raxxorrax 8y ago
  Always judge a company by how they treat their lowest employees. And since people at Amazon having difficulties trying to find time to take a piss, it doesn't really qualify as an employer for me personally. I like their services in AWS-land and they have really good solutions. They probably treat their developers better as long as they can be exploited. But if there is another service with comparable features, I generally don't have to think very long.
  - goldenkey 8y ago
    I worked there too in 2015. The culture is toxic. The most surprising thing was the way all the AWS services are built with a grab bag of different teams with entirely different languages, copying CSS and code all over the place. There were no real standards. I still like AWS but knowing how bad the sausage is made makes me cringe a bit...
    - akhilcacharya 8y ago
      I mean...if it performs well all of that is irrelevant to the customer.
      - h1d 8y ago
        While it works.
  - michaelt 8y ago
    Always judge a company by how they treat their lowest employees. Seems like a policy that gives a big advantage to industries that aren't labour-intensive. Is Costco a worse company than Oracle, because the former has employees making $30,000 and the latter doesn't?
flukus 8y ago
> especially if you were thinking about working on a game Why games especially? That seems to be the one area the would be absolutely free of any conflict of interest with amazon.
- Pfhreak 8y ago
  Amazon has a game studio producing games. They've publicly announced Breakaway, New World, and Crucible as three titles. Why games are different than other areas (e.g. why aren't web services called out separately with their own policy while games are? I'm not sure.)
  - throwaway1280 8y ago
    Yeah, it's really weird. Amazon has other IP-producing divisions, and even though Amazon Studios is very powerful, there's nothing preventing people from making their own video content. I wonder if it's just down to whoever leads that game studio pushing for such a rule.
- Zarel 8y ago
  I imagine it has to do with Amazon Lumberyard: https://aws.amazon.com/lumberyard/ https://aws.amazon.com/lumberyard/
yesenadam 8y ago
I just now started reading Merritt's Adventure in Prolog (1990), and the very beginning seems somehow relevant to this thread: "I was working for an aerospace company in the early 1970s when someone got a copy of the original Adventure game and installed it on our mainframe computer. For the next month my lunch hours, evenings and weekends, as well as normal work hours, were consumed with fighting the fierce green dragon and escaping from the twisty little passages. Finally, with a few hints about the plover's egg and dynamite, I had proudly earned all the points in the game. My elation turned to terror as I realized it was time for my performance review. My boss was a stern man, more comfortable with machines than people. He opened up a large computer printout containing a log of hours each programmer spent on the mainframe computer. He said he noticed that recently I had been working evenings and weekends and that he admired that type of dedication in his employees. He gave me the maximum raise and told me to keep up the good work."
StreamBright 8y ago
In the US, right? You can't do such a thing in the EU.
- troist 8y ago
  Have you got a source on that? Not questioning that it does sound like an EU thing, but it could come in handy at my current company if there's legislation on that and I can't seem to find any.
  - StreamBright 8y ago
    It is different country by country. In some countries if it wasn't done on a company equipment regarding your assignments the company cannot do anything about it and they cannot limit you to work on opensource/unpaid projects.
- camtarn 8y ago
  I worked for Amazon in the EU, and the rule was certainly in force. Whether or not it could be enforced is a different question, but none of us wanted to go up against Amazon's lawyers!
  - StreamBright 8y ago
    Amazon EU companies tend to follow blindly what is coming from the HQ. I personally experienced this. After warned the management about getting the ministry of employment involved they immediately backed down and let us implement something according to the EU law. It is the matter of knowing your position and the law.
mabbo 8y ago
The policies really used to be extreme. I'm still on the inside and I will say things have dramatically improved in the last couple years.
glenngillen 8y ago
I work at AWS. I have also been working on a game in my spare time. I don't know when you left but there are currently zero issues in these two things co-existing. Pretty standard requirements to make sure there's a clear separation of responsibilities and that you're not working on the game when you're meant to be at work, etc.

techslave 8y ago

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

notyourwork 8y ago

> “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 8y ago
For what it's worth when it comes to choosing a hosted ElasticSearch provider I would go to Elastic over AWS Elasticsearch Service.
- notyourwork 8y ago
  Interesting, as someone considering using AWS ES for an upcoming project I'd love to hear more about your experience.
  - ratling 8y ago
    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.

cperciva 8y ago

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

koolba 8y ago
What happened two years ago?
- whoisjuan 8y ago
  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 8y ago
    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-public-license-for-mongodb-community-server https://www.mongodb.com/press/mongodb-issues-new-server-side...
- cperciva 8y ago
  Oops, you're right -- the license change was more recent than that. I don't know why I was thinking that it was two years ago.

joelbondurant 8y ago

Duh, AWS's entire business model is strategically engineered dependency on closed source tooling.

fogetti 8y ago

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 8y ago
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 8y ago
  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).
yjftsjthsd-h 8y ago
You found it disgusting that a software vendor decided to implement features in order to match competitors in the space? That's... how product development works.
- fogetti 8y ago
  That's just the tip of the iceberg. I am not gonna repeat myself. Read my previous comments on the topic.

nemothekid 8y ago

>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 8y ago
How credible techcrunch should be considered a reliable journalism source here? This one smells pretty much like a money article
- tomnipotent 8y ago
  TechCrunch lost credibility a loooong time ago (well before being sold to AOL). It's safe to ignore any drivel it publishes.
- Aramgutang 8y ago
  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.
denisvlr 8y ago
It’s clearly presented as a quote from mongoDB’s CEO.
- jhanschoo 8y ago
  The quote tickles me because in earlier days MongoDB's choice of defaults gave it a reputation as a poor imitation of a reliable document store.

_cs2017_ 8y ago

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 8y ago
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 8y ago
  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 8y ago
    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 8y ago
      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)

int_19h 8y ago

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 8y ago
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.
- zodiac 8y ago
  Even assuming that AWS adds no value, what exactly is wrong with offering a "no value added" hosting service and charging for it?
  - bonzini 8y ago
    In fact hosting is already a value added, or no one would use it.
- robbyt 8y ago
  Realistically, I think that a large portion of that 300M went to sales and marketing at MongoDB... However, I agree with everything else you said.

ilovecaching 8y ago

> "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 8y ago
Firecracker? That was a big one to me.
- whoisjuan 8y ago
  Correto too.
plandis 8y ago
https://amzn.github.io https://amzn.github.io has all of the various open source projects Amazon has created

crb002 8y ago

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.

peterwwillis 8y ago

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

arbie 8y ago
> Could have gotten free fixes from the biggest lab in the world Wasn't this one of the main points of contention, though, in addition to not purchasing a commerical license? Amazon not upstreaming (m)any of the fixes?
- peterwwillis 8y ago
  I don't know, it's certainly possible. But at least there was the opportunity, as they have upstreamed fixes for other projects. And it's not like keeping the fixes private was hurting anyone (unless they're security fixes; I think modern licenses should require all security bugs at least be reported, in the absence of changesets)

Lazare 8y ago

That's a very tendentious title.

bradrydzewski 8y ago

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).

paulddraper 8y ago
You're absolutely right. AWS is not known to move that fast (though they are known to move faster if they think the competition is outpacing them). This undoubtedly had been in the works as Aurora for MongoDB. The timing is suspect, sure. But one look at Aurora for MySQL and Aurora for PostgreSQL will tell you that AWS would've gotten around to it regardless of licensing.
threeseed 8y ago
Reverse engineering the MongoDB API, getting it to work on Aurora storage engine, verifying existing CLI/drivers work and having it all scaleable and supportable. At least a few months work there. Even for Amazon.
robbyt 8y ago
Lawyers move slower than software engineers. There could have been years of exchanges between the company prior to this.
maximilianburke 8y ago
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".
athrun 8y ago
Difficult to know for sure, but it's probable that MongoDB made Amazon aware that they would introduce such a licensing change, in a bid to put pressure on AWS and get them to contract with MongoDB. It didn't work.

tobyjsullivan 8y ago

"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 8y ago
where art thou dang to come help us?

bwb 8y ago

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

exabrial 8y ago

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

threeseed 8y ago
And yet many of us are using it in Production. Including companies like Adobe, eBay, Expedia, Sony etc.
- pritambaral 8y ago
  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 8y ago
    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.
    - macintux 8y ago
      There are use cases where losing data is an acceptable tradeoff, particularly if the database is not the system of record.
    - erik_seaberg 8y ago
      A reckless enough design (e.g., returning success when a request is merely buffered at the client) can lose writes without telling you that it lost writes, which won't affect its popularity among users who don't audit for that.
    - pritambaral 8y ago

kerng 8y ago

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 8y ago
Is this comment supposed to be irony?

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

socrateslee 8y ago

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

hannob 8y ago

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.

VvR-Ox 8y ago

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 8y ago
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?

toyg 8y ago

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 8y ago
> 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 8y ago
  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.
  - geezerjay 8y ago
    > Because they have money Seriously?
    - toyg 8y ago

holografix 8y ago

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 8y ago
> 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 8y ago
  > 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.

justinjlynn 8y ago

> 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.

SergeAx 8y ago

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

throw2016 8y ago

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 8y ago
> 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.

cobbzilla 8y ago

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.

benologist 8y ago

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 8y ago
>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 8y ago
  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 8y ago
    Thanks - I suspected you were saying as much. MongoDB aside, can you share examples of this process?
    - benologist 8y ago
      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_partner_products/ https://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/03/08/amazon_copies_partn... I think you can add Heroku (AWS Beanstalk) even before that.

jgowdy 8y ago

"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?

Sir_Cmpwn 8y ago

>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 8y ago
Mongo was AGPL, not Apache 2. It seems unlikely Amazon was willing to integrate an AGPL code into AWS.
- Sir_Cmpwn 8y ago
  My bad, thanks for clarifying.

talkingtab 8y ago

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.

deleted 8y ago

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perseusprime11 8y ago

RIP MongoDB

cmmartin 8y ago

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 8y ago
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/faq#implications https://www.mongodb.com/licensing/server-side-public-license... 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.