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> 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

by 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
    - dspillett 8y ago
      Also large companies often value creating documentation and other "admin" much more than individual developers - individual developers appreciate this admin work having happened but often detest doing it themselves, where for a decent company the value of a smooth skills transfer process is more obvious and baked into the culture. This is far from always the case, of course, but projects that get a lot of input from commercial entities often have documentation that is more complete and (more importantly) more accurate/up-to-date than those that don't.
BrentOzar 8y ago
> These companies are some of the biggest contributors to open source. I wouldn't expect AWS to make a lot of code contributions to MongoDB when they've built something else that's 3.6 compatible, though. It's not like they're going to make contributions to a new, incompatible version of MongoDB. They've already made the call to fork. I agree with what you're saying about other products, but not this particular case.
- avar 8y ago
  Well yeah, that's the point. MongoDB's business model before was trying to sell Amazon CD's. Then they turned the screws on that and switched to an even more onerous license that a company like Amazon wasn't going to accept, so they wrote their own replacement. If it's an economic lesson in anything it's that companies and individual open source users alike are going to be a lot more careful about using any project where one for-profit company demands copyright assignment and can re-license the project at any time to squeeze existing users. MongoDB's bet was that they had enough of a moat that Amazon et al would fold up and accept their new terms, that was obviously miscalculated, but there still might be other similar cloud companies who'll fold. But both Amazon and other users are going to be a lot more careful in the future to not run critical infrastructure on some project that's likely to be subject to a future bait & switch by upstream.
- lwf 8y ago
  It isn't a fork, it's an entirely new database that implements the same API. c.f. https://twitter.com/nathankpeck/status/1083385031207387136 https://twitter.com/nathankpeck/status/1083385031207387136 from someone at AWS DevRel. There's nothing about Mongo's license that's super relevant here -- it's a similar situation to other cloud providers offering "S3"- or "EC2"-compatible APIs. (IANAL, but AIUI API copyright/fair-use isn't entirely settled in the US, Oracle v. Google nonwithstanding, since 9th Cir. isn't per se controlling precedent nationwide in copyright matters)
  - count 8y ago
    Also important is the API that AWS is compatible with was itself part of the OSS licensed code of an old version of mongo. Oracle vs. Google is different as Java was never OSS licensed.
zzzcpan 8y ago
> These companies are some of the biggest contributors to open source. It depends how you look at it. Take Kubernetes for example, Google open sources it, but there is a caveat, it's not really useful without all the necessary complementary services, that Google happens to offer you. Or take Android, exactly the same problem. Sure, there are some things they truly contribute to open source, but even among them a lot are not necessarily useful outside of those companies and are contributed purely to reduce costs or worse, to gain control. All of this is very different from Redis contribution for example. They never do things like that. > 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. You are missing the point. MongoDB never wanted to sell a license to Amazon or to anyone trying to compete with their own hosted offering. Same goes for any company trying to make money through SaaS. So it's not just unlikely, it's by design. And Amazon making their own implementation is expected outcome of this. Although I suspect no one is going to repeat MongoDB's mistake and release client libraries under permissive licenses after that. Next time Amazon tries to reimplement something, it won't be as drop in of a replacement, as it is now.
hodgesrm 8y ago
> These companies [AWS, Microsoft, and Google] are some of the biggest contributors to open source. True, but their contributions are quite selective. Google writes very good infrastructure code. However OSS DBMS services are quite different. They tend to originate in companies with data problems. Sometimes that's a company like Google or Microsoft, but more often it's a company like Facebook that has an issue processing a lot of data. BTW I'm not so sure AWS counts as a big OSS contributor. They use it but don't really make a lot of contributions back. This may change over time. Disclaimer: I work at Altinity, which offers support and software for ClickHouse. (Incidentally written by Yandex to process their clickstream data.)

by avar 8y ago

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
  - dspillett 8y ago
    Also large companies often value creating documentation and other "admin" much more than individual developers - individual developers appreciate this admin work having happened but often detest doing it themselves, where for a decent company the value of a smooth skills transfer process is more obvious and baked into the culture. This is far from always the case, of course, but projects that get a lot of input from commercial entities often have documentation that is more complete and (more importantly) more accurate/up-to-date than those that don't.

BrentOzar 8y ago

> These companies are some of the biggest contributors to open source. I wouldn't expect AWS to make a lot of code contributions to MongoDB when they've built something else that's 3.6 compatible, though. It's not like they're going to make contributions to a new, incompatible version of MongoDB. They've already made the call to fork. I agree with what you're saying about other products, but not this particular case.

avar 8y ago
Well yeah, that's the point. MongoDB's business model before was trying to sell Amazon CD's. Then they turned the screws on that and switched to an even more onerous license that a company like Amazon wasn't going to accept, so they wrote their own replacement. If it's an economic lesson in anything it's that companies and individual open source users alike are going to be a lot more careful about using any project where one for-profit company demands copyright assignment and can re-license the project at any time to squeeze existing users. MongoDB's bet was that they had enough of a moat that Amazon et al would fold up and accept their new terms, that was obviously miscalculated, but there still might be other similar cloud companies who'll fold. But both Amazon and other users are going to be a lot more careful in the future to not run critical infrastructure on some project that's likely to be subject to a future bait & switch by upstream.
lwf 8y ago
It isn't a fork, it's an entirely new database that implements the same API. c.f. https://twitter.com/nathankpeck/status/1083385031207387136 https://twitter.com/nathankpeck/status/1083385031207387136 from someone at AWS DevRel. There's nothing about Mongo's license that's super relevant here -- it's a similar situation to other cloud providers offering "S3"- or "EC2"-compatible APIs. (IANAL, but AIUI API copyright/fair-use isn't entirely settled in the US, Oracle v. Google nonwithstanding, since 9th Cir. isn't per se controlling precedent nationwide in copyright matters)
- count 8y ago
  Also important is the API that AWS is compatible with was itself part of the OSS licensed code of an old version of mongo. Oracle vs. Google is different as Java was never OSS licensed.

zzzcpan 8y ago

> These companies are some of the biggest contributors to open source. It depends how you look at it. Take Kubernetes for example, Google open sources it, but there is a caveat, it's not really useful without all the necessary complementary services, that Google happens to offer you. Or take Android, exactly the same problem. Sure, there are some things they truly contribute to open source, but even among them a lot are not necessarily useful outside of those companies and are contributed purely to reduce costs or worse, to gain control. All of this is very different from Redis contribution for example. They never do things like that. > 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. You are missing the point. MongoDB never wanted to sell a license to Amazon or to anyone trying to compete with their own hosted offering. Same goes for any company trying to make money through SaaS. So it's not just unlikely, it's by design. And Amazon making their own implementation is expected outcome of this. Although I suspect no one is going to repeat MongoDB's mistake and release client libraries under permissive licenses after that. Next time Amazon tries to reimplement something, it won't be as drop in of a replacement, as it is now.

hodgesrm 8y ago

> These companies [AWS, Microsoft, and Google] are some of the biggest contributors to open source. True, but their contributions are quite selective. Google writes very good infrastructure code. However OSS DBMS services are quite different. They tend to originate in companies with data problems. Sometimes that's a company like Google or Microsoft, but more often it's a company like Facebook that has an issue processing a lot of data. BTW I'm not so sure AWS counts as a big OSS contributor. They use it but don't really make a lot of contributions back. This may change over time. Disclaimer: I work at Altinity, which offers support and software for ClickHouse. (Incidentally written by Yandex to process their clickstream data.)