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My interpretation is the opposite. MongoDB is clearly successful - they are a public company worth 16 billion dollars. And they proving the success of the open

by lacker 6y ago

My interpretation is the opposite. MongoDB is clearly successful - they are a public company worth 16 billion dollars. And they proving the success of the open core business model. For 99% of use cases, MongoDB is open source. You can see the code, you can make modifications, you can use it for free in your business, you can share your changes with others, you can integrate it into your products and services. Yeah, you can't use it if you're working at AWS, but for most people it's just fine. For founders creating new open source companies, it's a great strategy to go the route of MongoDB. Start off open source and sell services. If you run into big enough problems with direct competitors using your own software, you can modify the license to exclude them. This is far better than the status quo in, say, 2010, when the conventional wisdom was that if you're providing a service it shouldn't involve any open source at all.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
julianmarq 6y ago
I'd replace mongo with redis in your comment. Redis truly is open core, but mongo no longer is. Now it's source available, and has been removed from the repos of many distros. Calling mongo open source now just dilutes what "open source" actually means. The organization even removed the submission of its license for approval by the OSI. It's source available, and it's up to each person to decide whether that's good or bad.
- lacker 6y ago
  That’s true, but Redis and MongoDB are at different points in their growth. Redis is worth around 1 billion, and they are still private. I would not be surprised if Redis usage continues to grow, which attracts more competitors, and they eventually shift to a “99% open” model more similar to MongoDB.
- aaron_m04 6y ago
  > Now it's source available, and has been removed from the repos of many distros. I wasn't aware the licensing is more restrictive now.
- qchris 6y ago
  I know that there's a formal definition of capitalized "Open Source" by the OSI, but I'm also not enchanted by that being the only definition for lower-case "open source". I think that the lower case open source is really more about a general approach to software (or intellectual property in general, really). Some people want to use terms like "libre" to refer to projects that have most of the practical characteristics of open source projects, but not an OSI-approved license, but I kind of think that the lower-case version of the term is important because it's reached a point of basically a colloquialism. There's room for a grey area, but I think that the parent's comment about how Mongo's license relates to the overwhelming majority of it's community to use it (in that, functionally, it doesn't) still pushes farther towards open source than it does proprietary with source-available.
  - chrisseaton 6y ago
    People forget that the OSI and the people behind it neither own, nor invented, the term 'open source.' They want to give you the impression that they do and they did, but they don't and they didn't.
    - lowdose 6y ago
      Who did?
      - chrisseaton 6y ago
        I don't know - not sure anyone does. Christine Peterson claims to have invented the term in 1998. https://opensource.com/article/18/2/coining-term-open-source-software https://opensource.com/article/18/2/coining-term-open-source... But at least this much is not true - we can see it being used, in context, at least as far back as 1996. I think people involved in this project at the time say it was a common term back then as well, but I can't find a reference for that now. http://www.xent.com/FoRK-archive/fall96/0269.html http://www.xent.com/FoRK-archive/fall96/0269.html And they certainly don't own it - they wrote a whole article on their own website still available about how they don't own it! https://opensource.org/pressreleases/certified-open-source.php https://opensource.org/pressreleases/certified-open-source.p...
vosper 6y ago
Mongo is also proving the success of vendor lock-in: you (or the engineers before you, and the engineers before them) make a mess in Mongo, because there are no relations and no schemas [0], and it becomes really difficult to get off it. The effort required just to get your data in a state that's clean enough to consider moving to the RDBMS you should have started with can be overwhelming. Then you have to rewrite your queries out of their custom query language. Is it Mongo's fault you made a mess in your database? No, of course not. And their dashboard is actually pretty nice. But you are massively locked-in. Source: own a production Mongo DB with years of accumulated mess in it. Desperate to get off it. Paying customer of Mongo's hosting (it's one less Mongo thing to deal with, at least). [0] There is schema support now, but it's only JSON schema and it's relatively new in the scheme [sorry] of things
- breakfastduck 6y ago
  Agreed. MongoDB makes it far too easy to make terrible decisions in regard to data design.
- bonestormii_ 6y ago
  This isn't really vendor lock-in, though. It's simply a technical/design lock-in. Going from unstructured to structured data presents problems, and if you do that, it's rightfully up to you to fix. It is different from the vendor lock-in that prevents one from migrating from AWS to Google Cloud because all of your code uses their APIs and libraries specifically. However, the effect is the same, of course. You are locked in! It's not necessarily a bad thing, but this is why you must choose your poison carefully.
  - vosper 6y ago
    > This isn't really vendor lock-in, though. It's simply a technical/design lock-in. Going from unstructured to structured data presents problems, and if you do that, it's rightfully up to you to fix. This is true, but it's also kind of vendor lock-in because there's a whole query language and aggregation pipeline for Mongo that's completely different to other databases. If I was using an RDBMS and was switching from MySQL to Postgres I think I would likely have a much easier time, because fundamentally it's all SQL (I know, there are differences between Postgres and MySQL, but it's a lot less, and a good ORM will smooth some of it out for you - at least initially) I think this is basically equivalent to your example of not being able to easily move from AWS to Google Cloud because of their different APIs. It doesn't seem like SQL-to-Mongo is impossible to implement, because there is third-party tooling for that (which I haven't tried): https://studio3t.com/knowledge-base/articles/sql-query/ https://studio3t.com/knowledge-base/articles/sql-query/
jfengel 6y ago
I took the opposite route in 2010, and it didn't work out well for me. We sold it as a premium product, and it was hard to get adoption. Which made it hard to actually prove the benefits we claimed should exist. That's not proof that we'd have fared better if we had open-sourced it. We took exactly the opposite route of MongoDB, with very stringent schemas to ensure data quality. That required a large up-front investment in time, and that was a hard sell too. The whole world went in the opposite direction, of schemaless databases and machine learning for "eh, good enough" answers. Still, I'll always wonder if we wouldn't have failed so spectacularly if we'd open sourced it. The idea was a pretty good one, and we wrote some remarkable software to make it happen.
- 3np 6y ago
  What is the "it" you're referring to here?
  - jfengel 6y ago
    The company was called Highfleet. We built ontology-based databases. Not OWL ontologies; we were actually doing ontologies before OWL. We were briefly and tangentially involved, but we thought they had picked the wrong level of ontology. We had a full-featured logic language for really strong definitions, so that you have strong guarantees about data quality and good ways to reason about data integration between databases. In the end we never found the right use case for it. The advantages were all in maintenance rather than development, and even people who could be talked around to it wouldn't see the payoff. There were a trillion other problems, and maybe better management than me could have made it work.
infinity0 6y ago
I wish there was a FOSS license with a clause along the lines of: - if your company makes >X revenue a year, give us some of it. Ofc, they (FSF/OSI/DFSG) would have to relax their FOSS definition(s), but with more projects dying in this way hopefully more FOSS organisations will take heed and think about this. Ofc, the wording of the license has to be precise enough to avoid something like fobbing off the servers to technically be controlled by subsidiaries with 0 revenue. Ofc, the license would have to figure out how to share revenue with major contributors too. Contributors already contribute to for-profit open source projects without themselves getting paid, so this license would make the situation strictly better for them. Laws and definitions have to change with the changing times - the technological economy is different today than it was 20 years ago when tech companies weren't so big or able to throw their weight around. Staying true to the original spirit of FOSS and sharing, means that we have to find ways to support independent FOSS business. The loudest arguments I hear at forcing the FOSS definition to remain static and blind to revenue, is from big tech companies or wealthy people being paid by big tech companies, because it benefits them. People working for a small FOSS companies understand the realities of competing in today's tech environment, and understand that revenue-sharing far from stifling FOSS, will allow it to flourish properly.
- orlandohill 6y ago
  You can achieve something similar by dual-licensing under a paid license and the source-available license, Polyform Small Business. https://polyformproject.org/licenses/small-business/1.0.0 https://polyformproject.org/licenses/small-business/1.0.0
  - infinity0 6y ago
    That license is specifically targeted in favour of small businesses for some reason, omitting individuals etc. This potential FOSS license I am talking about would only target against big tech companies.
- theamk 6y ago
  Is this going to be fixed/known price? then you are describing "source available" model. I don't think we need another word for it -- it exists, and it works pretty well (even Microsoft uses it sometimes) Or are you describing some sort of system where the authors get the fixed share (%) of user's company revenue? I think this is not going to work very well... just imagine a big company which is not focused on computers. Or a computer startup which wants to be bought by FAANG for billions of dollars.

by lacker 6y ago

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

julianmarq 6y ago

I'd replace mongo with redis in your comment. Redis truly is open core, but mongo no longer is. Now it's source available, and has been removed from the repos of many distros. Calling mongo open source now just dilutes what "open source" actually means. The organization even removed the submission of its license for approval by the OSI. It's source available, and it's up to each person to decide whether that's good or bad.

lacker 6y ago
That’s true, but Redis and MongoDB are at different points in their growth. Redis is worth around 1 billion, and they are still private. I would not be surprised if Redis usage continues to grow, which attracts more competitors, and they eventually shift to a “99% open” model more similar to MongoDB.
aaron_m04 6y ago
> Now it's source available, and has been removed from the repos of many distros. I wasn't aware the licensing is more restrictive now.
qchris 6y ago
I know that there's a formal definition of capitalized "Open Source" by the OSI, but I'm also not enchanted by that being the only definition for lower-case "open source". I think that the lower case open source is really more about a general approach to software (or intellectual property in general, really). Some people want to use terms like "libre" to refer to projects that have most of the practical characteristics of open source projects, but not an OSI-approved license, but I kind of think that the lower-case version of the term is important because it's reached a point of basically a colloquialism. There's room for a grey area, but I think that the parent's comment about how Mongo's license relates to the overwhelming majority of it's community to use it (in that, functionally, it doesn't) still pushes farther towards open source than it does proprietary with source-available.
- chrisseaton 6y ago
  People forget that the OSI and the people behind it neither own, nor invented, the term 'open source.' They want to give you the impression that they do and they did, but they don't and they didn't.
  - lowdose 6y ago
    Who did?
    - chrisseaton 6y ago
      I don't know - not sure anyone does. Christine Peterson claims to have invented the term in 1998. https://opensource.com/article/18/2/coining-term-open-source-software https://opensource.com/article/18/2/coining-term-open-source... But at least this much is not true - we can see it being used, in context, at least as far back as 1996. I think people involved in this project at the time say it was a common term back then as well, but I can't find a reference for that now. http://www.xent.com/FoRK-archive/fall96/0269.html http://www.xent.com/FoRK-archive/fall96/0269.html And they certainly don't own it - they wrote a whole article on their own website still available about how they don't own it! https://opensource.org/pressreleases/certified-open-source.php https://opensource.org/pressreleases/certified-open-source.p...

vosper 6y ago

Mongo is also proving the success of vendor lock-in: you (or the engineers before you, and the engineers before them) make a mess in Mongo, because there are no relations and no schemas [0], and it becomes really difficult to get off it. The effort required just to get your data in a state that's clean enough to consider moving to the RDBMS you should have started with can be overwhelming. Then you have to rewrite your queries out of their custom query language. Is it Mongo's fault you made a mess in your database? No, of course not. And their dashboard is actually pretty nice. But you are massively locked-in. Source: own a production Mongo DB with years of accumulated mess in it. Desperate to get off it. Paying customer of Mongo's hosting (it's one less Mongo thing to deal with, at least). [0] There is schema support now, but it's only JSON schema and it's relatively new in the scheme [sorry] of things

breakfastduck 6y ago
Agreed. MongoDB makes it far too easy to make terrible decisions in regard to data design.
bonestormii_ 6y ago
This isn't really vendor lock-in, though. It's simply a technical/design lock-in. Going from unstructured to structured data presents problems, and if you do that, it's rightfully up to you to fix. It is different from the vendor lock-in that prevents one from migrating from AWS to Google Cloud because all of your code uses their APIs and libraries specifically. However, the effect is the same, of course. You are locked in! It's not necessarily a bad thing, but this is why you must choose your poison carefully.
- vosper 6y ago
  > This isn't really vendor lock-in, though. It's simply a technical/design lock-in. Going from unstructured to structured data presents problems, and if you do that, it's rightfully up to you to fix. This is true, but it's also kind of vendor lock-in because there's a whole query language and aggregation pipeline for Mongo that's completely different to other databases. If I was using an RDBMS and was switching from MySQL to Postgres I think I would likely have a much easier time, because fundamentally it's all SQL (I know, there are differences between Postgres and MySQL, but it's a lot less, and a good ORM will smooth some of it out for you - at least initially) I think this is basically equivalent to your example of not being able to easily move from AWS to Google Cloud because of their different APIs. It doesn't seem like SQL-to-Mongo is impossible to implement, because there is third-party tooling for that (which I haven't tried): https://studio3t.com/knowledge-base/articles/sql-query/ https://studio3t.com/knowledge-base/articles/sql-query/

jfengel 6y ago

I took the opposite route in 2010, and it didn't work out well for me. We sold it as a premium product, and it was hard to get adoption. Which made it hard to actually prove the benefits we claimed should exist. That's not proof that we'd have fared better if we had open-sourced it. We took exactly the opposite route of MongoDB, with very stringent schemas to ensure data quality. That required a large up-front investment in time, and that was a hard sell too. The whole world went in the opposite direction, of schemaless databases and machine learning for "eh, good enough" answers. Still, I'll always wonder if we wouldn't have failed so spectacularly if we'd open sourced it. The idea was a pretty good one, and we wrote some remarkable software to make it happen.

3np 6y ago
What is the "it" you're referring to here?
- jfengel 6y ago
  The company was called Highfleet. We built ontology-based databases. Not OWL ontologies; we were actually doing ontologies before OWL. We were briefly and tangentially involved, but we thought they had picked the wrong level of ontology. We had a full-featured logic language for really strong definitions, so that you have strong guarantees about data quality and good ways to reason about data integration between databases. In the end we never found the right use case for it. The advantages were all in maintenance rather than development, and even people who could be talked around to it wouldn't see the payoff. There were a trillion other problems, and maybe better management than me could have made it work.

infinity0 6y ago

I wish there was a FOSS license with a clause along the lines of: - if your company makes >X revenue a year, give us some of it. Ofc, they (FSF/OSI/DFSG) would have to relax their FOSS definition(s), but with more projects dying in this way hopefully more FOSS organisations will take heed and think about this. Ofc, the wording of the license has to be precise enough to avoid something like fobbing off the servers to technically be controlled by subsidiaries with 0 revenue. Ofc, the license would have to figure out how to share revenue with major contributors too. Contributors already contribute to for-profit open source projects without themselves getting paid, so this license would make the situation strictly better for them. Laws and definitions have to change with the changing times - the technological economy is different today than it was 20 years ago when tech companies weren't so big or able to throw their weight around. Staying true to the original spirit of FOSS and sharing, means that we have to find ways to support independent FOSS business. The loudest arguments I hear at forcing the FOSS definition to remain static and blind to revenue, is from big tech companies or wealthy people being paid by big tech companies, because it benefits them. People working for a small FOSS companies understand the realities of competing in today's tech environment, and understand that revenue-sharing far from stifling FOSS, will allow it to flourish properly.

orlandohill 6y ago
You can achieve something similar by dual-licensing under a paid license and the source-available license, Polyform Small Business. https://polyformproject.org/licenses/small-business/1.0.0 https://polyformproject.org/licenses/small-business/1.0.0
- infinity0 6y ago
  That license is specifically targeted in favour of small businesses for some reason, omitting individuals etc. This potential FOSS license I am talking about would only target against big tech companies.
theamk 6y ago
Is this going to be fixed/known price? then you are describing "source available" model. I don't think we need another word for it -- it exists, and it works pretty well (even Microsoft uses it sometimes) Or are you describing some sort of system where the authors get the fixed share (%) of user's company revenue? I think this is not going to work very well... just imagine a big company which is not focused on computers. Or a computer startup which wants to be bought by FAANG for billions of dollars.