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I don't really see how cloud providers are using their "monopoly power to adopt any successful open source project without contributing anything to it". The fac
by johncolanduoni 8y ago
I don't really see how cloud providers are using their "monopoly power to adopt any successful open source project without contributing anything to it". The fact that e.g. AWS is a (near) monopoly, or even just massive has little to do with it. They provide VMs, those VMs can run software, and if you want they'll manage the VMs with the given software for you if you'd rather not worry about it. Rackspace does the same thing, and they're a million miles away from a monopoly.
I don't see how these measures are practical either. Redis is much easier to do a cleanroom implementation of than MongoDB, so I doubt this kind of thing will produce any other kind of response from Amazon.
- skrebbel 8y agoIt's not about VMs, it's about "Amazon so-and-so is a fully managed cloud database that speaks the XYZ protocol", which is code for "we forked a popular open source product and we're not going to contribute our changes back".
- johncolanduoni 8y agoI don’t believe that DocumentDB actually runs any MongoDB code. On the other extreme, there aren’t any apparent Amazon-only features in their services that are simply hosted versions like they do with Redis (via Elasticache). If that was the issue these companies could have just gone with the AGPL. The problem isn’t that they’re maintaining internal forks with changes they won’t contribute back, it’s that they’re either (a) running unmodified versions or (b) cleanrooming the whole shebang. I don’t see how to make the first impossible without effectively using a proprietary license, and banning the second would hurt open source much more than it would help it