6 ms·

Evolving ArangoDB's Licensing Model for a Sustainable Future

45 points by hnbad 3y ago

eikenberry 3y ago
> Firstly, the source code will replace its existing Apache 2.0 license with the BSL 1.1 for future versions. > Our commitment to open-source ideals remains unshaken. Except for the fact that you are no longer using an open source license. So not so much committed to it as abandoning it.
- notpushkin 3y ago
  Except with BSL it will still be available as an open source software at some point in the future. This is certainly better than moving to a non-free-and-will-never-be kind of license. However, the way they've also changed “community edition” builds to forbid commercial usage is kinda fucked up.
  - yjftsjthsd-h 3y ago
    Sure, someday then-obsolete versions will slowly become FOSS, but they aren't for a long time.
    - pas 3y ago
      countless instances of 4 year old software are running in critical roles. if it's so good, then a community can take on the burden of backporting fixes and/or watching for CVEs for 4 years. it's not a long time. it's inconvenient, for sure.
      - yjftsjthsd-h 3y ago
        They can't backport fixes or look at the newer code for help because that newer code isn't open source yet. It's true that a community that really wanted to could start implementing their own bug fixes, but I wouldn't hold my breath.
- mdaniel 3y ago
  > Our commitment to jumping on the "screw you" licensing train means we can't even be bothered to use the SPX licensing identifier for BuSL correctly And, to save others the click, they're using the "4 year cliff" version
  - evanelias 3y ago
    > we can't even be bothered to use the SPX licensing identifier for BuSL correctly Not taking a side on this, but just for historical context: the business source license was originally created by MariaDB, who referred to it as "BSL" and continue to do so [1]. So in the database world, calling it "BSL" is not especially unusual. If I understand correctly, SPDX already assigned BSL as the short-code for the Boost Software License, so they assigned BuSL to the Business Source License. Although the Boost Software License has been around since 2003, aside from Boost using it (obviously) it doesn't seem to be a popular choice among other projects. So adopters of the Business Source License then have to choose between agreeing with the license's creators vs agreeing with SPDX. [1] https://mariadb.com/bsl-faq-mariadb/ https://mariadb.com/bsl-faq-mariadb/
- cookiengineer 3y ago
  The reason why more and more projects have to do that, is pretty much AWS. Most open source projects had managed services as an income stream for development, and AWS destroyed that while not giving back a single cent. So yeah, the real dragon here is Amazon in my opinion. The projects don't have a choice. It's either BSL/AGPL or dead project. In the world of enterprise, nobody is gonna introduce a new hosting provider if they already have all the ISO audits for AWS or Azure.
  - beanjuiceII 3y ago
    this aws scapegoat keeps getting worse with no real merit behind it
  - josephcsible 3y ago
    > It's either BSL/AGPL or dead project. AGPL is an infinitely better choice than BSL. Nobody would have been upset had they switched to that instead.
    - wmf 3y ago
      I may be in a minority of one, but I consider it disingenuous for companies to use GPL/AGPL to drive people towards commercial licenses. BUSL is at least honest about what's going on.
      - josephcsible 3y ago
        How is it disingenuous? With GPL/AGPL it's actually FOSS. With BUSL it's not. If anything is disingenuous, it's the latter.
        wmf 3y ago
        The result is the same so it's misleading that one is technically Open Source™ and the other is not.
        3y ago
- tomcam 3y ago
  What is your best suggestion to keep them in business then?
  - yjftsjthsd-h 3y ago
    Two options: * Stay open source, switch to AGPL so AWS/Google won't use it * Stop being open source, but just say that's what you're doing instead of this dishonest "we <3 open source (just kidding we're not actually doing pen source)"
    - kapilvt 3y ago
      last I checked neither of those would touch GPLv3 either.
jchw 3y ago
Re-licensing open source software with non-open source licensing is not a commitment to open source, and I'm content with calling out this kind of cognitive dissonance bullshit for as long as it takes. It's not the end of the world, but if you think that softens the blow, it doesn't. It's just plain-and-simple dishonesty.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- cmrdporcupine 3y ago
  Clearly what they meant by "committed to open source" is "committed to taking advantage of other people's open source contributions". This is why we have the GPL, people. Defend your hard work.
  - josephcsible 3y ago
    Remember that copyleft licenses like the GPL, while necessary to prevent this kind of thing from happening, aren't themselves sufficient to do so. The project would also need to have accepted significant external contributions without a CLA.
  - wmf 3y ago
    Were there any contributions?
    - hnbad 3y ago
      I think there used to be community-maintained drivers but it looks like most of them are dead and they only link to official ones. Most PRs on their repos also seem to be from org members (presumably employees?).
      - rom99 3y ago
        As a maintainer of the C#/.NET driver, I'd say our project isn't so much dead as it is complete. We use it in our products and if it requires updates due to breaking changes, we will maintain it, but otherwise it does what we need it to. Also worth noting that ArangoDB did have one of their own developers work on the project and made many contributions.
kikoreis 3y ago
Given my history I'm definitely not a fan of this madness in the licensing space. But I am also willing to acknowledge that the 1P vs 3P bomb set off by the public cloud incumbents will continue to yield damage to the open source startup ecosystem until something changes.
maxpert 3y ago
Clearly killing open source and wrapping it in $h1t sandwich! I wonder if they were not making enough money, and somebody advised them to do this stupid move.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- PeterZaitsev 3y ago
  Yeah, Looking at LinkedIn Insights they put hiring on pause for a while https://www.linkedin.com/company/arangodb/insights/ https://www.linkedin.com/company/arangodb/insights/ I think at this point of their development they need to find a way to drive more adoption and ditching Open Source is unlikely to help
candiddevmike 3y ago
IMO, companies should go source available by default instead of bait and switch FOSS. If your business model isn't compatible with FOSS (which I would argue most aren't), don't do it. I think being honest with your intentions up front has value, and you can charge for your software in a way that doesn't create a financial cliff when converting from free to paid (make up margins with volume etc). I hope the rest of the ecosystem starts to feel this way and becomes comfortable paying for software again, especially from a sustainability perspective.
- wmf 3y ago
  Newer startups will probably be BUSL from day one. What we're seeing now are ZIRP startups reaching the limits of their old "open-source it and they will come" strategy.
  - carterschonwald 3y ago
    What’s ZIRP mean?
    - ignoramous 3y ago
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero_interest-rate_policy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero_interest-rate_policy I guess they mean startups funded during the past few years when US VCs were awash with cash.
    - beembeem 3y ago
      Zero Interest Rate Policy
  - Macha 3y ago
    I don't think so - many of these applications would never have reached the size and popularity they did as closed source or source available. We'll probably see more "open source for the growth, slam shut to monetise easier", but I think each one that does so will reduce trust in all such software, so I'd expect ultimately it will lead to companies either picking "definitely proprietary but with known terms" or "full on open source, controlled by a foundation" and avoiding this company=project middle ground.
RcouF1uZ4gsC 3y ago
ArangoDb Series B Funding https://arangodb.com/2021/10/announcing-arangodb-series-b-funding/ https://arangodb.com/2021/10/announcing-arangodb-series-b-fu... I don’t think that Venture Capital and open source companies mix. The monetization at the scale needed for venture capital is just not there. To clarify, a venture backed company can use, make, and release open source, but open source should not be the source of its revenue.
manbart 3y ago
100GB per cluster in the free version? May as well just run SQLite on a single server for a dataset that size
- jitl 3y ago
  It sounds like you can compile it yourself to remove that restriction under the BSL, rather than using their pre compiled version.
  - hnbad 3y ago
    As I understand it, the pre compiled version will eventually include features that aren't in the public repo, acting as a limited trial version of the enterprise release.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
glenngillen 3y ago
People keep pointing fingers at large cloud vendors as being the root of the problem here, and I hard disagree. I’ve been on both sides of this for more than a decade and helped run a large marketplace full of devtool SaaS products. Here’s my non-exhaustive list of problems that got us to this point: - Developers as a target market being exceptionally hard to market/sell to and incredibly price sensitive. You have to give away huge amounts of value upfront and hope you can make up the difference later. - Layer in, depending on your perspective, some healthy concern about needing to have ownership of the core parts of your stack or cynicism about trusting a third-party with your things. - free + source available becomes the conventional wisdom about how to overcome these issues and reach your audience. I’m the process this also gets conflated with “OSS” because we didn’t know better/that was the precedent. - a whole generation of people are encouraged to default to an incredibly permissive OSS for all their projects. It’s actually super cool and a lot of novel ideas emerge as a result. - some of these become wildly popular. The inventors/maintainers think they should probably build a business around this. - They go raise a VC round on the back of their OSS success. Now there’s a lot of pressure to generate VC outcomes. - They start by selling consulting/enterprise support/etc because RedHat was the role model for how to build a successful OSS business. - they realise that is actually super hard and unlikely to actually drive the VC outcome they need. - they pivot into a SaaS/cloud model instead. The growth and margin potential looks like it stacks up better given the outcomes they’re after. - they eventually discover that simply running the software for you isn’t as lucrative as they thought. For a start, thinking you’re the best at running it purely because you invented it is pure hubris. That’s true at the start, but it doesn’t take much scale for the nuanced expertise of running one specific piece of software is overshadowed by the complexities of running and connecting thousands of anything. - so… right at the point when you’re beginning to be weighed down by being a victim of your own success, is the same point where the various other vendors who are good at scale are getting pushed to address an opportunity. They’ve customers lining up saying “hey, we want to use X. But we don’t want to run it ourselves, but we want it inside our VPC. With all of the IAM and other controls we’ve come to expect with everything else”. And so the vendors respond. - The creators change the license in a scramble to buy more time while they work out what’s actually wrong with their business model. The problem is people trying to sell and OSS product. You’ve already given it away! The thing people pay for needs to be a _completely different_ but complementary product. If that product is “we’ll run software” then don’t be surprised if you find yourself competing with other companies who have more experience in running software (sidebar: I think Instaclustr is a fascinating example of what it would look like to actually lean into this. Don’t run just one piece of software well, carve out a niche at being the best of running any OSS data layer). Even RedHat had a different product: the support. But the answer has always been that you need a paid enterprise product that has a _feature set_ that you haven’t already given away. Maybe you access that via a cloud service. Maybe it’s an in prem run it yourself thing. Maybe it’s actual humans putting their hands on the keys.
ftyhbhyjnjk 3y ago
AWS is the actual villain here. They are the one abusing open source work while giving nothing in return. We can all keep blabbering that it's not open source anymore, and blah blah, but the reality is that development of such systems is incredibly time consuming, and costs real money. Providing hosted solutions and offering some sirt of consultancy are the only 2 realistic income streams for the people who actually have built 99% of that. Companies like Amazon destroy this because of their greed.
- pritambaral 3y ago
  This is FUD. It was FUD when this argument was introduced by a scummy marketing company with product they call a database, and it remains FUD in this case also. 1. AWS never provided a hosted Mongo instance. You know who did? Small startups that provided better support than MongoDB Inc., without the scummy "just dump money into MongoDB Atlas! It will solve all your problems! I promise!" spiel that the marketing company in disguise shoved down its customers' throats (even paying customers). MongoDB Inc. went around buying out these startups for cents on the dollar right before they publicly announced the license change. 2. AWS did provide a hosted ElasticSearch service. And they did contribute code in return. Amazon's patches to ES included oft-requested security features that ES upstream flat out refused to merge because that'd harm ES corporate's monetization strategy of demanding money for basic security. ES community edition was not a good citizen of the Open Source world. 3. You don't hear this kind of FUD from the PostgreSQL community. Because that is an actually Open Source project with a really good community. Amazon participates in it as a full member of the community: contributing dev time to not just get their features in, but to also review patches that have nothing to do with AWS and of no benefit to them, to even paying for PG evangelism. 4. AWS provides no hosted ArangoDB service.
  - redwood 3y ago
    Re (1) that's because they rebuilt one which represents an ongoing cost and tax that makes it harder for them to compete. Your other gross generalizations are massive distortion of history.. one was acquired by IBM and one was acquired by Rackspace and another remains independent. Re (2) I think elastic's failure to shift into a cloud/saas company is something of an own goal/failure to execute probably because of misplaced sales incentives and sales in logging and security giving a distorted lens into the community but Amazon very clearly strip mined their community as well. Re (3) that's completely untrue... there are about 15 companies competing for postgres and postgres-like mindshare right now and you sure as hell better believe most of them believe the hyperscalers' anti-competitive approach to going to market is a major impediment to their own ability to be stay viable and execute. Re (4) that's because it is not yet popular enough to see ROI from strip mining... but presumably the creators want it to become popular
PeterZaitsev 3y ago
I wonder what is really going on. If you check DBEngines you can see ArangoDB has been stagnant for years https://db-engines.com/en/ranking_trend/system/ArangoDB https://db-engines.com/en/ranking_trend/system/ArangoDB I do not see at this level of popularity big clouds to start provide ArangoDB as a service to really compete with them Is this an act of desperation to raise some additional funds, telling to investors they are protected from cloud competition ? Something else ?
- lvca 3y ago
  100% agree. Nobody is really interested on having ArangoDB on the cloud as a service. I guess >99% of the users are not paying and the company is running out of money (sales guys cost a lot!). I think this is a suicide for the product. Clients will remain, also because the switch is expensive. Their proprietary AQL is not easy to convert into SQL, Cypher or Gremlin....

45 points by hnbad 3y ago

> Firstly, the source code will replace its existing Apache 2.0 license with the BSL 1.1 for future versions. > Our commitment to open-source ideals remains unshaken. Except for the fact that you are no longer using an open source license. So not so much committed to it as abandoning it.

notpushkin 3y ago
Except with BSL it will still be available as an open source software at some point in the future. This is certainly better than moving to a non-free-and-will-never-be kind of license. However, the way they've also changed “community edition” builds to forbid commercial usage is kinda fucked up.
- yjftsjthsd-h 3y ago
  Sure, someday then-obsolete versions will slowly become FOSS, but they aren't for a long time.
  - pas 3y ago
    countless instances of 4 year old software are running in critical roles. if it's so good, then a community can take on the burden of backporting fixes and/or watching for CVEs for 4 years. it's not a long time. it's inconvenient, for sure.
    - yjftsjthsd-h 3y ago
      They can't backport fixes or look at the newer code for help because that newer code isn't open source yet. It's true that a community that really wanted to could start implementing their own bug fixes, but I wouldn't hold my breath.
mdaniel 3y ago
> Our commitment to jumping on the "screw you" licensing train means we can't even be bothered to use the SPX licensing identifier for BuSL correctly And, to save others the click, they're using the "4 year cliff" version
- evanelias 3y ago
  > we can't even be bothered to use the SPX licensing identifier for BuSL correctly Not taking a side on this, but just for historical context: the business source license was originally created by MariaDB, who referred to it as "BSL" and continue to do so [1]. So in the database world, calling it "BSL" is not especially unusual. If I understand correctly, SPDX already assigned BSL as the short-code for the Boost Software License, so they assigned BuSL to the Business Source License. Although the Boost Software License has been around since 2003, aside from Boost using it (obviously) it doesn't seem to be a popular choice among other projects. So adopters of the Business Source License then have to choose between agreeing with the license's creators vs agreeing with SPDX. [1] https://mariadb.com/bsl-faq-mariadb/ https://mariadb.com/bsl-faq-mariadb/
cookiengineer 3y ago
The reason why more and more projects have to do that, is pretty much AWS. Most open source projects had managed services as an income stream for development, and AWS destroyed that while not giving back a single cent. So yeah, the real dragon here is Amazon in my opinion. The projects don't have a choice. It's either BSL/AGPL or dead project. In the world of enterprise, nobody is gonna introduce a new hosting provider if they already have all the ISO audits for AWS or Azure.
- beanjuiceII 3y ago
  this aws scapegoat keeps getting worse with no real merit behind it
- josephcsible 3y ago
  > It's either BSL/AGPL or dead project. AGPL is an infinitely better choice than BSL. Nobody would have been upset had they switched to that instead.
  - wmf 3y ago
    I may be in a minority of one, but I consider it disingenuous for companies to use GPL/AGPL to drive people towards commercial licenses. BUSL is at least honest about what's going on.
    - josephcsible 3y ago
      How is it disingenuous? With GPL/AGPL it's actually FOSS. With BUSL it's not. If anything is disingenuous, it's the latter.
      - wmf 3y ago
        The result is the same so it's misleading that one is technically Open Source™ and the other is not.
        3y ago
tomcam 3y ago
What is your best suggestion to keep them in business then?
- yjftsjthsd-h 3y ago
  Two options: * Stay open source, switch to AGPL so AWS/Google won't use it * Stop being open source, but just say that's what you're doing instead of this dishonest "we <3 open source (just kidding we're not actually doing pen source)"
  - kapilvt 3y ago
    last I checked neither of those would touch GPLv3 either.

jchw 3y ago

Re-licensing open source software with non-open source licensing is not a commitment to open source, and I'm content with calling out this kind of cognitive dissonance bullshit for as long as it takes. It's not the end of the world, but if you think that softens the blow, it doesn't. It's just plain-and-simple dishonesty.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
cmrdporcupine 3y ago
Clearly what they meant by "committed to open source" is "committed to taking advantage of other people's open source contributions". This is why we have the GPL, people. Defend your hard work.
- josephcsible 3y ago
  Remember that copyleft licenses like the GPL, while necessary to prevent this kind of thing from happening, aren't themselves sufficient to do so. The project would also need to have accepted significant external contributions without a CLA.
- wmf 3y ago
  Were there any contributions?
  - hnbad 3y ago
    I think there used to be community-maintained drivers but it looks like most of them are dead and they only link to official ones. Most PRs on their repos also seem to be from org members (presumably employees?).
    - rom99 3y ago
      As a maintainer of the C#/.NET driver, I'd say our project isn't so much dead as it is complete. We use it in our products and if it requires updates due to breaking changes, we will maintain it, but otherwise it does what we need it to. Also worth noting that ArangoDB did have one of their own developers work on the project and made many contributions.

kikoreis 3y ago

Given my history I'm definitely not a fan of this madness in the licensing space. But I am also willing to acknowledge that the 1P vs 3P bomb set off by the public cloud incumbents will continue to yield damage to the open source startup ecosystem until something changes.

maxpert 3y ago

Clearly killing open source and wrapping it in $h1t sandwich! I wonder if they were not making enough money, and somebody advised them to do this stupid move.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
PeterZaitsev 3y ago
Yeah, Looking at LinkedIn Insights they put hiring on pause for a while https://www.linkedin.com/company/arangodb/insights/ https://www.linkedin.com/company/arangodb/insights/ I think at this point of their development they need to find a way to drive more adoption and ditching Open Source is unlikely to help

candiddevmike 3y ago

IMO, companies should go source available by default instead of bait and switch FOSS. If your business model isn't compatible with FOSS (which I would argue most aren't), don't do it. I think being honest with your intentions up front has value, and you can charge for your software in a way that doesn't create a financial cliff when converting from free to paid (make up margins with volume etc). I hope the rest of the ecosystem starts to feel this way and becomes comfortable paying for software again, especially from a sustainability perspective.

wmf 3y ago
Newer startups will probably be BUSL from day one. What we're seeing now are ZIRP startups reaching the limits of their old "open-source it and they will come" strategy.
- carterschonwald 3y ago
  What’s ZIRP mean?
  - ignoramous 3y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero_interest-rate_policy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero_interest-rate_policy I guess they mean startups funded during the past few years when US VCs were awash with cash.
  - beembeem 3y ago
    Zero Interest Rate Policy
- Macha 3y ago
  I don't think so - many of these applications would never have reached the size and popularity they did as closed source or source available. We'll probably see more "open source for the growth, slam shut to monetise easier", but I think each one that does so will reduce trust in all such software, so I'd expect ultimately it will lead to companies either picking "definitely proprietary but with known terms" or "full on open source, controlled by a foundation" and avoiding this company=project middle ground.

RcouF1uZ4gsC 3y ago

ArangoDb Series B Funding https://arangodb.com/2021/10/announcing-arangodb-series-b-funding/ https://arangodb.com/2021/10/announcing-arangodb-series-b-fu... I don’t think that Venture Capital and open source companies mix. The monetization at the scale needed for venture capital is just not there. To clarify, a venture backed company can use, make, and release open source, but open source should not be the source of its revenue.

manbart 3y ago

100GB per cluster in the free version? May as well just run SQLite on a single server for a dataset that size

jitl 3y ago
It sounds like you can compile it yourself to remove that restriction under the BSL, rather than using their pre compiled version.
- hnbad 3y ago
  As I understand it, the pre compiled version will eventually include features that aren't in the public repo, acting as a limited trial version of the enterprise release.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

glenngillen 3y ago

People keep pointing fingers at large cloud vendors as being the root of the problem here, and I hard disagree. I’ve been on both sides of this for more than a decade and helped run a large marketplace full of devtool SaaS products. Here’s my non-exhaustive list of problems that got us to this point: - Developers as a target market being exceptionally hard to market/sell to and incredibly price sensitive. You have to give away huge amounts of value upfront and hope you can make up the difference later. - Layer in, depending on your perspective, some healthy concern about needing to have ownership of the core parts of your stack or cynicism about trusting a third-party with your things. - free + source available becomes the conventional wisdom about how to overcome these issues and reach your audience. I’m the process this also gets conflated with “OSS” because we didn’t know better/that was the precedent. - a whole generation of people are encouraged to default to an incredibly permissive OSS for all their projects. It’s actually super cool and a lot of novel ideas emerge as a result. - some of these become wildly popular. The inventors/maintainers think they should probably build a business around this. - They go raise a VC round on the back of their OSS success. Now there’s a lot of pressure to generate VC outcomes. - They start by selling consulting/enterprise support/etc because RedHat was the role model for how to build a successful OSS business. - they realise that is actually super hard and unlikely to actually drive the VC outcome they need. - they pivot into a SaaS/cloud model instead. The growth and margin potential looks like it stacks up better given the outcomes they’re after. - they eventually discover that simply running the software for you isn’t as lucrative as they thought. For a start, thinking you’re the best at running it purely because you invented it is pure hubris. That’s true at the start, but it doesn’t take much scale for the nuanced expertise of running one specific piece of software is overshadowed by the complexities of running and connecting thousands of anything. - so… right at the point when you’re beginning to be weighed down by being a victim of your own success, is the same point where the various other vendors who are good at scale are getting pushed to address an opportunity. They’ve customers lining up saying “hey, we want to use X. But we don’t want to run it ourselves, but we want it inside our VPC. With all of the IAM and other controls we’ve come to expect with everything else”. And so the vendors respond. - The creators change the license in a scramble to buy more time while they work out what’s actually wrong with their business model. The problem is people trying to sell and OSS product. You’ve already given it away! The thing people pay for needs to be a _completely different_ but complementary product. If that product is “we’ll run software” then don’t be surprised if you find yourself competing with other companies who have more experience in running software (sidebar: I think Instaclustr is a fascinating example of what it would look like to actually lean into this. Don’t run just one piece of software well, carve out a niche at being the best of running any OSS data layer). Even RedHat had a different product: the support. But the answer has always been that you need a paid enterprise product that has a _feature set_ that you haven’t already given away. Maybe you access that via a cloud service. Maybe it’s an in prem run it yourself thing. Maybe it’s actual humans putting their hands on the keys.

ftyhbhyjnjk 3y ago

AWS is the actual villain here. They are the one abusing open source work while giving nothing in return. We can all keep blabbering that it's not open source anymore, and blah blah, but the reality is that development of such systems is incredibly time consuming, and costs real money. Providing hosted solutions and offering some sirt of consultancy are the only 2 realistic income streams for the people who actually have built 99% of that. Companies like Amazon destroy this because of their greed.

pritambaral 3y ago
This is FUD. It was FUD when this argument was introduced by a scummy marketing company with product they call a database, and it remains FUD in this case also. 1. AWS never provided a hosted Mongo instance. You know who did? Small startups that provided better support than MongoDB Inc., without the scummy "just dump money into MongoDB Atlas! It will solve all your problems! I promise!" spiel that the marketing company in disguise shoved down its customers' throats (even paying customers). MongoDB Inc. went around buying out these startups for cents on the dollar right before they publicly announced the license change. 2. AWS did provide a hosted ElasticSearch service. And they did contribute code in return. Amazon's patches to ES included oft-requested security features that ES upstream flat out refused to merge because that'd harm ES corporate's monetization strategy of demanding money for basic security. ES community edition was not a good citizen of the Open Source world. 3. You don't hear this kind of FUD from the PostgreSQL community. Because that is an actually Open Source project with a really good community. Amazon participates in it as a full member of the community: contributing dev time to not just get their features in, but to also review patches that have nothing to do with AWS and of no benefit to them, to even paying for PG evangelism. 4. AWS provides no hosted ArangoDB service.
- redwood 3y ago
  Re (1) that's because they rebuilt one which represents an ongoing cost and tax that makes it harder for them to compete. Your other gross generalizations are massive distortion of history.. one was acquired by IBM and one was acquired by Rackspace and another remains independent. Re (2) I think elastic's failure to shift into a cloud/saas company is something of an own goal/failure to execute probably because of misplaced sales incentives and sales in logging and security giving a distorted lens into the community but Amazon very clearly strip mined their community as well. Re (3) that's completely untrue... there are about 15 companies competing for postgres and postgres-like mindshare right now and you sure as hell better believe most of them believe the hyperscalers' anti-competitive approach to going to market is a major impediment to their own ability to be stay viable and execute. Re (4) that's because it is not yet popular enough to see ROI from strip mining... but presumably the creators want it to become popular

PeterZaitsev 3y ago

I wonder what is really going on. If you check DBEngines you can see ArangoDB has been stagnant for years https://db-engines.com/en/ranking_trend/system/ArangoDB https://db-engines.com/en/ranking_trend/system/ArangoDB I do not see at this level of popularity big clouds to start provide ArangoDB as a service to really compete with them Is this an act of desperation to raise some additional funds, telling to investors they are protected from cloud competition ? Something else ?

lvca 3y ago
100% agree. Nobody is really interested on having ArangoDB on the cloud as a service. I guess >99% of the users are not paying and the company is running out of money (sales guys cost a lot!). I think this is a suicide for the product. Clients will remain, also because the switch is expensive. Their proprietary AQL is not easy to convert into SQL, Cypher or Gremlin....