19 ms·

AWS, MongoDB, and the Economic Realities of Open Source

502 points by abd12 8y ago

nwhatt 8y ago
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?
- hendzen 8y ago
  MongoDB is competing with AWS. Atlas actually runs on top of AWS - Mongo is capturing the spread between their per-instance charge and the AWS charge (or GCE/Azure). What this article ignores is that Atlas is actually competing quite well and has significant adoption. The people who run MongoDB are not dumb, they will try to turn the hosting in to a commodity before Amazon can turn the DB in to a commodity.
- gbear605 8y ago
  I know nothing about MongoDB pricing, but it’s possible that Amazon is taking a loss on DocumentDB to keep companies using solely AWS products, while MongoDB Inc. obviously can’t do that since they have no other revenue stream. So the competition might be both convenience and price vs features. Features sounds likely to lose that battle.
  - raxxorrax 8y ago
    Very possible. They do it with retail too to conquer the market. Very successfully because they have laziness on their side. You can bet that they don't care about some millions for development. On the contrary, it will help saving taxes. Amazons behavior has been an amazing long-term, something many companies are thoroughly lacking.
- duggan 8y ago
  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 8y ago
    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/mongo-apis.html https://docs.aws.amazon.com/documentdb/latest/developerguide...) compared to MongoDB 3.6 and you would be missing out on improvements available in MongoDB 4.0 and future versions.
- jeffbax 8y ago
  I would not underestimate those two advantages. Even Microsoft and Google are getting outpaced by them overall. It might only be that Amazon competes with so many companies anymore that they choose the second and third place solutions.
- scarface74 8y ago
  Why can't MongoDB can't compete with AWS? Aside from cloud vendor lock-in, and economies of scale that AWS has. That’s kind of the point. If you want a managed service, Mongo can’t compete at the scale of AWS. And by definition, if AWS is offering the same API, there is no “cloud vendor lock in”.
  - merlynn 8y ago
    MongoDB certainly can compete at scale with AWS with MongoDB Atlas - Managed Database as a Service.
    - scarface74 8y ago
      By hosting on AWS, Azure, and GCP... And even then they don’t host your database in your own VPC which is a big deal to some companies.
      - merlynn 8y ago
        But with Atlas, you can VPC peer if you need that level of security and performance between your app and database. https://docs.atlas.mongodb.com/security-vpc-peering/ https://docs.atlas.mongodb.com/security-vpc-peering/
        scarface74 8y ago
        I agree with you. But, some security folks still don’t think that’s good enough. These are usually old school on prem security guys who don’t really get cloud.
- techslave 8y ago
  > Why can't MongoDB can't compete with AWS? IMHO, it's the need for single pane of glass management, coupled with single throat to choke accountability. Buyers are often willing to give up on best-of-breed features/performance/cost in exchange for simplification of process and workflow.
dhh2106 8y ago
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?
- pas 8y ago
  Elastic? They basically build a lot of extra (and very useful) functionality outside elasticsearch and sell that.
  - Xylakant 8y ago
    They still suffer from the same problem: AWS is selling it's own elasticsearch service. It comes with a set of severe restrictions and is way less capable than elastics own offering, but it's improving and I see it used more and more often.
    - jsiepkes 8y ago
      If Amazon doesn't want to pay for your product they are not going to. They will just (re)implement it themselves with a compatible API. Even if MongoDB was a proprietary product with an Oracle-style pricelist Amazon still would have done the same: Reimplement it with compatible API. Then again the reverse is also true. Just look at all the software providing an S3 compatible API.
      - zaat 8y ago
        Well, Google (or rather, the original Android) did that to Oracle with the Java API, and Oracle, being Oracle, sued.
- BossingAround 8y ago
  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)
deleted 8y ago
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KaoruAoiShiho 8y ago
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-change-makes-cloud-based-spatialos-games-illegal/ https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2019/01/unity-engine-tos-chan... 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!
- zozbot123 8y ago
  Why would you expect a viable open source company to be a "megacap" anyway? The whole point of the open source development model is that, properly applied, it's more efficient and less costly than its closed-source alternative, while delivering significantly more value to its userbase. By contrast, the complementary services that an OSS-focused company actively sells (such as support) are in fact quite expensive. You wouldn't expect a support business to be "megacap", unless it actually manages to reach IBM- or RedHat-scale, which by definition very few businesses ever will. The real competition is not Unreal vs. Unity, but both Unreal and Unity vs. e.g. Blender. (Which was actually funded as an open source project by its users, back in the day. But at a relatively low 'valuation', compared to Unity!)
  - KaoruAoiShiho 8y ago
    > more efficient and less costly than its closed-source alternative This is just not true in reality. Open source projects cost generally the same as closed source projects. Companies like mongo and unity employs about the same amount of engineers to work on it and the idea of high cost savings due to thousands of randos contributing code is vastly exaggerated. Same cost + no profit + having to develop a secondary core competency in a competitive commodity business like support and hosting = dangerous and non-scalable model. Also never heard of a game using the Blender game engine...
donatj 8y ago
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.
- mdpopescu 8y ago
  No. The best is the enemy of the good. I do not want to live in North Korea rather than (say) in the UK, because at least the NK government is honest about its intentions.
- zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 8y ago
  Really, it's simply not Open Source software, that's nothing more than a marketing lie, so we should stop calling it that.
- jhanschoo 8y ago
  The open source that you call "isn't free as in speech" is actually Free Software. You are able to develop with it in whatever way you want. The requirement is that whatever you develop is also Free Software and is distributed whenever it is used. This is what Stallman has in mind when he talks about free software. Your freedom to develop above free software developed by others cannot come at the cost of others' freedom to develop above your software that has enjoyed the fruits of said freedom.
  - julienb_sea 8y ago
    This distinction seems highly misleading. Free is not free if it comes with a litany of restrictions. Licensing concerns pretty much blacklist a swath of open source software for actual use in a business context. Sure, many companies are willing to open source their developer friendly projects. Microsoft with VSCode is a great example. Same with Atlassian's contributions to complex open source UI components. Frankly, these are not done as revenue drivers, but instead as recruiting tools and ecosystem builders. Those benefits are ancillary to the core competency of the parent company. It does not make sense for companies to open source all of their code. It's far too easy in today's world to stand up a highly reliable, performant and scalable SaaS application. Protecting the code behind a SaaS application allows companies to grow and protect themselves at an early stage. IMO this is a significant benefit to the open source community given the open source contributions that established SaaS companies tend to eventually move into. "Free" software is not free at all if people are unable to use it in their systems for fear of legal repercussions.
lettergram 8y ago
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.
pjc50 8y ago
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.
- jimmychangas 8y ago
  > there's no intrinsic reason that the same company that gives away labour as OSS should also make the best complements to that OSS There are no guarantees that they will provide the best complements to their own product, but the common sense is that they will. From a marketing perspective, I think it makes complete sense, especially when selling to enterprise customers.
  - scarface74 8y ago
    But they don’t. The best complement for server side software is often being able to do it reliably, globally, redundantly, managed, on demand, and cheaply. The only three companies that can do that reliably as far as most customers are concerned are Amazon, Microsoft, and Google.
    - ojosilva 8y ago
z3t4 8y ago
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 8y ago
  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 8y ago
    At scale you need to move out of the cloud. Once you hit a certain point there is no economic gain.
    - sokoloff 8y ago
      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 8y ago
        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 8y ago
        > When purchasing RI I saw 800K a month. I don't understand. Can you please clarify?
gaius 8y ago
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 8y ago
  MongoDB has a fully managed service called MongoDB Atlas that runs on AWS (and Azure, GCP).
avar 8y ago
> 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.
- matwood 8y ago
  I agree. It's important to point out specifically that many companies are paying for OSS with developer time instead of money. IMO, that is better than money and fits the OSS ethos.
  - zozbot123 8y ago
    > IMO, that is better than money IMO, it's not. SF developer time is hella expensive, and OSS projects can hire developers on their own, somewhere cheaper. Where a software company can help OSS cheaply and effectively is by providing support for interoperability with their own business area, and by relicensing their existing, non-core-business IP under favorable terms.
    - bpicolo 8y ago
      > OSS projects can hire developers on their own, somewhere cheaper A lot of the bigger OSS projects require an expertise you're not going to find outside of megacorps, because they have internal scale/process problems/otherwise that necessitate interesting problem solving
Beltiras 8y ago
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 8y ago
  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 8y ago
    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 8y ago
      They aren't used.
      - cmsj 8y ago
        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.
javajosh 8y ago
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 8y ago
  Unreal engine charges 5% royalty for projects using it (waived for the first $3k/quarter).
reacweb 8y ago
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.
- pjmlp 8y ago
  There is lots of juice in Oracle SQL that even PostgreSQL is lacking. GraalVM would never exist with weekend developers. Top level JIT and almost non stoping GC algorithms don't get implementated with late nighters.
- pweissbrod 8y ago
  "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 8y ago
    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 8y ago
      You wrote in the past tense. Did something change your view?
      - pjc50 8y ago
        I lost track of the detail and am vaguely aware of a Java renaissance, but not clear whether that's real or whether Oracle are responsible or whether it's Clojure. So now I don't know whether I have reasons to hate Oracle. But I keep a little resentment warm just in case.
saranshk 8y ago
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.
talkingtab 8y ago
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.
- dest 8y ago
  Isn't it what GPL is about? Forcing users to follow the rules of the club?
  - ryanisnan 8y ago
    It makes sense why orgs choose not to use GPL software, though. For those reliant on proprietary tech, it's a loose thread in a knit sweater. I worry that backing orgs like MongoDB are being punished by their position, to the extent that their ability to operate will cease, which will hurt that project potentially. So in essence, GPL has a problem, whether or not it is the problem.
- cmsj 8y ago
  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.
dkrich 8y ago
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?
benologist 8y ago
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-copy-cat-products-targeted-as-eu-quizzes-smaller-rivals https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-09-27/amazon-s-... 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_partner_products/ https://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/03/08/amazon_copies_partn...
- zby 8y ago
  [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 :(
Proven 8y ago
> It’s hard to not be sympathetic to MongoDB Inc. and Redis Labs: both spent a lot of money and effort building their products, and now Amazon is making money off of them. I disagree. Many early adopters got on board with MongoDB because the DB was released under a permissive open source license. Later some of them became hostages to it. The second reason is no one forced the two to develop the software and do business that way.
rglover 8y ago
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 8y ago
  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.
jayd16 8y ago
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 8y ago
  I thought so too, it's similar on how BigTable also supports the HBase APIs.
ig1 8y ago
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.
bobm_kite9 8y ago
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 8y ago
  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.
philipswood 8y ago
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.
zby 8y ago
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 8y ago
  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 8y ago
    Why would AWS be a customer if Mongo was entirely proprietary and not when it is mostly Open Source?
    - manigandham 8y ago
      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 8y ago
        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 8y ago
        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.
deleted 8y ago
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kevinAtStorj 8y ago
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-storage-projections-for-2018-part-1/#41e9a3a13a20 https://www.forbes.com/sites/tomcoughlin/2017/12/20/digital-...). 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 8y ago
  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 8y ago
    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-v3-test-network-storj-sdk/ https://storj.io/blog/2019/01/getting-started-with-the-storj...
tfolbrecht 8y ago
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 8y ago
  The article mentions that MongoDB already has its own hosted database service, Atlas.
  - tfolbrecht 8y ago
    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 8y ago
      https://www.mongodb.com/cloud/stitch https://www.mongodb.com/cloud/stitch
- techslave 8y ago
  Agreed, and I was downvoted to oblivion a couple weeks back for saying as much. > Stop being a crybaby when someone makes a few forms and buttons that spins up a vm with your DB software running Sure, but that's not what Amazon did. They implemented the API. It's not MDB behind it. (A few HN comments from awhile ago seem to think it's some flavor of PGSQL.)
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TagAsDelusion 8y ago
paying a company is not 'open' anything
sebringj 8y ago
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 8y ago
  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/mongo-apis.html https://docs.aws.amazon.com/documentdb/latest/developerguide...). 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 8y ago
    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.
manigandham 8y ago
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.
robotsquidward 8y ago
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.
sytse 8y ago
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.
rahilb 8y ago
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.
privateSFacct 8y ago
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 8y ago
  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.
ojosilva 8y ago
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.
throw2016 8y ago
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.
shmerl 8y ago
> 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.
jillesvangurp 8y ago
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.
merlynn 8y ago
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.
dcbadacd 8y ago
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.

502 points by abd12 8y ago

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?

hendzen 8y ago
MongoDB is competing with AWS. Atlas actually runs on top of AWS - Mongo is capturing the spread between their per-instance charge and the AWS charge (or GCE/Azure). What this article ignores is that Atlas is actually competing quite well and has significant adoption. The people who run MongoDB are not dumb, they will try to turn the hosting in to a commodity before Amazon can turn the DB in to a commodity.
gbear605 8y ago
I know nothing about MongoDB pricing, but it’s possible that Amazon is taking a loss on DocumentDB to keep companies using solely AWS products, while MongoDB Inc. obviously can’t do that since they have no other revenue stream. So the competition might be both convenience and price vs features. Features sounds likely to lose that battle.
- raxxorrax 8y ago
  Very possible. They do it with retail too to conquer the market. Very successfully because they have laziness on their side. You can bet that they don't care about some millions for development. On the contrary, it will help saving taxes. Amazons behavior has been an amazing long-term, something many companies are thoroughly lacking.
duggan 8y ago
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 8y ago
  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/mongo-apis.html https://docs.aws.amazon.com/documentdb/latest/developerguide...) compared to MongoDB 3.6 and you would be missing out on improvements available in MongoDB 4.0 and future versions.
jeffbax 8y ago
I would not underestimate those two advantages. Even Microsoft and Google are getting outpaced by them overall. It might only be that Amazon competes with so many companies anymore that they choose the second and third place solutions.
scarface74 8y ago
Why can't MongoDB can't compete with AWS? Aside from cloud vendor lock-in, and economies of scale that AWS has. That’s kind of the point. If you want a managed service, Mongo can’t compete at the scale of AWS. And by definition, if AWS is offering the same API, there is no “cloud vendor lock in”.
- merlynn 8y ago
  MongoDB certainly can compete at scale with AWS with MongoDB Atlas - Managed Database as a Service.
  - scarface74 8y ago
    By hosting on AWS, Azure, and GCP... And even then they don’t host your database in your own VPC which is a big deal to some companies.
    - merlynn 8y ago
      But with Atlas, you can VPC peer if you need that level of security and performance between your app and database. https://docs.atlas.mongodb.com/security-vpc-peering/ https://docs.atlas.mongodb.com/security-vpc-peering/
      - scarface74 8y ago
        I agree with you. But, some security folks still don’t think that’s good enough. These are usually old school on prem security guys who don’t really get cloud.
techslave 8y ago
> Why can't MongoDB can't compete with AWS? IMHO, it's the need for single pane of glass management, coupled with single throat to choke accountability. Buyers are often willing to give up on best-of-breed features/performance/cost in exchange for simplification of process and workflow.

dhh2106 8y ago

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?

pas 8y ago
Elastic? They basically build a lot of extra (and very useful) functionality outside elasticsearch and sell that.
- Xylakant 8y ago
  They still suffer from the same problem: AWS is selling it's own elasticsearch service. It comes with a set of severe restrictions and is way less capable than elastics own offering, but it's improving and I see it used more and more often.
  - jsiepkes 8y ago
    If Amazon doesn't want to pay for your product they are not going to. They will just (re)implement it themselves with a compatible API. Even if MongoDB was a proprietary product with an Oracle-style pricelist Amazon still would have done the same: Reimplement it with compatible API. Then again the reverse is also true. Just look at all the software providing an S3 compatible API.
    - zaat 8y ago
      Well, Google (or rather, the original Android) did that to Oracle with the Java API, and Oracle, being Oracle, sued.
BossingAround 8y ago
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)

deleted 8y ago

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KaoruAoiShiho 8y ago

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-change-makes-cloud-based-spatialos-games-illegal/ https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2019/01/unity-engine-tos-chan... 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!

zozbot123 8y ago
Why would you expect a viable open source company to be a "megacap" anyway? The whole point of the open source development model is that, properly applied, it's more efficient and less costly than its closed-source alternative, while delivering significantly more value to its userbase. By contrast, the complementary services that an OSS-focused company actively sells (such as support) are in fact quite expensive. You wouldn't expect a support business to be "megacap", unless it actually manages to reach IBM- or RedHat-scale, which by definition very few businesses ever will. The real competition is not Unreal vs. Unity, but both Unreal and Unity vs. e.g. Blender. (Which was actually funded as an open source project by its users, back in the day. But at a relatively low 'valuation', compared to Unity!)
- KaoruAoiShiho 8y ago
  > more efficient and less costly than its closed-source alternative This is just not true in reality. Open source projects cost generally the same as closed source projects. Companies like mongo and unity employs about the same amount of engineers to work on it and the idea of high cost savings due to thousands of randos contributing code is vastly exaggerated. Same cost + no profit + having to develop a secondary core competency in a competitive commodity business like support and hosting = dangerous and non-scalable model. Also never heard of a game using the Blender game engine...

donatj 8y ago

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.

mdpopescu 8y ago
No. The best is the enemy of the good. I do not want to live in North Korea rather than (say) in the UK, because at least the NK government is honest about its intentions.
zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 8y ago
Really, it's simply not Open Source software, that's nothing more than a marketing lie, so we should stop calling it that.
jhanschoo 8y ago
The open source that you call "isn't free as in speech" is actually Free Software. You are able to develop with it in whatever way you want. The requirement is that whatever you develop is also Free Software and is distributed whenever it is used. This is what Stallman has in mind when he talks about free software. Your freedom to develop above free software developed by others cannot come at the cost of others' freedom to develop above your software that has enjoyed the fruits of said freedom.
- julienb_sea 8y ago
  This distinction seems highly misleading. Free is not free if it comes with a litany of restrictions. Licensing concerns pretty much blacklist a swath of open source software for actual use in a business context. Sure, many companies are willing to open source their developer friendly projects. Microsoft with VSCode is a great example. Same with Atlassian's contributions to complex open source UI components. Frankly, these are not done as revenue drivers, but instead as recruiting tools and ecosystem builders. Those benefits are ancillary to the core competency of the parent company. It does not make sense for companies to open source all of their code. It's far too easy in today's world to stand up a highly reliable, performant and scalable SaaS application. Protecting the code behind a SaaS application allows companies to grow and protect themselves at an early stage. IMO this is a significant benefit to the open source community given the open source contributions that established SaaS companies tend to eventually move into. "Free" software is not free at all if people are unable to use it in their systems for fear of legal repercussions.

lettergram 8y ago

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.

pjc50 8y ago

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.

jimmychangas 8y ago
> there's no intrinsic reason that the same company that gives away labour as OSS should also make the best complements to that OSS There are no guarantees that they will provide the best complements to their own product, but the common sense is that they will. From a marketing perspective, I think it makes complete sense, especially when selling to enterprise customers.
- scarface74 8y ago
  But they don’t. The best complement for server side software is often being able to do it reliably, globally, redundantly, managed, on demand, and cheaply. The only three companies that can do that reliably as far as most customers are concerned are Amazon, Microsoft, and Google.
  - ojosilva 8y ago

z3t4 8y ago

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 8y ago
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 8y ago
  At scale you need to move out of the cloud. Once you hit a certain point there is no economic gain.
  - sokoloff 8y ago
    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 8y ago
      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 8y ago
        > When purchasing RI I saw 800K a month. I don't understand. Can you please clarify?

gaius 8y ago

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 8y ago
MongoDB has a fully managed service called MongoDB Atlas that runs on AWS (and Azure, GCP).

avar 8y ago

> 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.

matwood 8y ago
I agree. It's important to point out specifically that many companies are paying for OSS with developer time instead of money. IMO, that is better than money and fits the OSS ethos.
- zozbot123 8y ago
  > IMO, that is better than money IMO, it's not. SF developer time is hella expensive, and OSS projects can hire developers on their own, somewhere cheaper. Where a software company can help OSS cheaply and effectively is by providing support for interoperability with their own business area, and by relicensing their existing, non-core-business IP under favorable terms.
  - bpicolo 8y ago
    > OSS projects can hire developers on their own, somewhere cheaper A lot of the bigger OSS projects require an expertise you're not going to find outside of megacorps, because they have internal scale/process problems/otherwise that necessitate interesting problem solving

Beltiras 8y ago

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 8y ago
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 8y ago
  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 8y ago
    They aren't used.
    - cmsj 8y ago
      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.

javajosh 8y ago

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 8y ago
Unreal engine charges 5% royalty for projects using it (waived for the first $3k/quarter).

reacweb 8y ago

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.

pjmlp 8y ago
There is lots of juice in Oracle SQL that even PostgreSQL is lacking. GraalVM would never exist with weekend developers. Top level JIT and almost non stoping GC algorithms don't get implementated with late nighters.
pweissbrod 8y ago
"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 8y ago
  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 8y ago
    You wrote in the past tense. Did something change your view?
    - pjc50 8y ago
      I lost track of the detail and am vaguely aware of a Java renaissance, but not clear whether that's real or whether Oracle are responsible or whether it's Clojure. So now I don't know whether I have reasons to hate Oracle. But I keep a little resentment warm just in case.

saranshk 8y ago

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.

talkingtab 8y ago

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.

dest 8y ago
Isn't it what GPL is about? Forcing users to follow the rules of the club?
- ryanisnan 8y ago
  It makes sense why orgs choose not to use GPL software, though. For those reliant on proprietary tech, it's a loose thread in a knit sweater. I worry that backing orgs like MongoDB are being punished by their position, to the extent that their ability to operate will cease, which will hurt that project potentially. So in essence, GPL has a problem, whether or not it is the problem.
cmsj 8y ago
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.

dkrich 8y ago

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?

benologist 8y ago

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-copy-cat-products-targeted-as-eu-quizzes-smaller-rivals https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-09-27/amazon-s-... 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_partner_products/ https://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/03/08/amazon_copies_partn...

zby 8y ago
[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 :(

Proven 8y ago

> It’s hard to not be sympathetic to MongoDB Inc. and Redis Labs: both spent a lot of money and effort building their products, and now Amazon is making money off of them. I disagree. Many early adopters got on board with MongoDB because the DB was released under a permissive open source license. Later some of them became hostages to it. The second reason is no one forced the two to develop the software and do business that way.

rglover 8y ago

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 8y ago
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.

jayd16 8y ago

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 8y ago
I thought so too, it's similar on how BigTable also supports the HBase APIs.

ig1 8y ago

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.

bobm_kite9 8y ago

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 8y ago
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.

philipswood 8y ago

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.

zby 8y ago

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 8y ago
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 8y ago
  Why would AWS be a customer if Mongo was entirely proprietary and not when it is mostly Open Source?
  - manigandham 8y ago
    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 8y ago
      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 8y ago
        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.

deleted 8y ago

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kevinAtStorj 8y ago

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-storage-projections-for-2018-part-1/#41e9a3a13a20 https://www.forbes.com/sites/tomcoughlin/2017/12/20/digital-...). 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 8y ago
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 8y ago
  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-v3-test-network-storj-sdk/ https://storj.io/blog/2019/01/getting-started-with-the-storj...

tfolbrecht 8y ago

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 8y ago
The article mentions that MongoDB already has its own hosted database service, Atlas.
- tfolbrecht 8y ago
  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 8y ago
    https://www.mongodb.com/cloud/stitch https://www.mongodb.com/cloud/stitch
techslave 8y ago
Agreed, and I was downvoted to oblivion a couple weeks back for saying as much. > Stop being a crybaby when someone makes a few forms and buttons that spins up a vm with your DB software running Sure, but that's not what Amazon did. They implemented the API. It's not MDB behind it. (A few HN comments from awhile ago seem to think it's some flavor of PGSQL.)

deleted 8y ago

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TagAsDelusion 8y ago

paying a company is not 'open' anything

sebringj 8y ago

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 8y ago
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/mongo-apis.html https://docs.aws.amazon.com/documentdb/latest/developerguide...). 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 8y ago
  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.

manigandham 8y ago

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.

robotsquidward 8y ago

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.

sytse 8y ago

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.

rahilb 8y ago

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.

privateSFacct 8y ago

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 8y ago
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.

ojosilva 8y ago

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.

throw2016 8y ago

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.

shmerl 8y ago

> 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.

jillesvangurp 8y ago

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.

merlynn 8y ago

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.

dcbadacd 8y ago

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.