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And that's also how DB companies try to monetize. So a hyperscaler offering this directly really undermines your entire business. In the past you could offer a

And that's also how DB companies try to monetize. So a hyperscaler offering this directly really undermines your entire business. In the past you could offer a Enterprise version with support, but with the move to the cloud that market is shrinking and Amazon is eating the new market themselves

thayne 3y ago
Perhaps we need a different way to fund database development (not necessarily a single company monetizing it). If the service you provide is hosting DBs, you are are at an inherent disadvantage competing with hosted db offerings form your potential customers' cloud provider. Even if your product is technically superior in every way, you are another entity they have to do business with (billing, support, contracts, security evaluations, etc.), which adds friction, and either you host on your own infrastructure, which means higher network latency, and network costs to get data to and from your customer's cloud, or you have hosting options that run inside all the major cloud providers, in any regions your customers use, which means you (or your customer) ends up paying the hyperscaler for the infrastructure, and you have the added complexity of having to know how to manage it on multiple cloud platforms. And there there is also the fact that it is much more difficult for you to build integration with the cloud's IAM or other services. Basically, most cloud customers would rather use a service that is part of the cloud platform than from another provider. Ideally, instead of competing with the hyperscalers, they would sell some service to the hyperscalers that have the ir own hosted services. But I don't know how to get there. As a brief sidenote, AFAICT this isn't what happened with the hashicorp license change, for them it seems like the pressure largely came from startups, not the big cloud companies.
- dragonwriter 3y ago
  > Perhaps we need a different way to fund database development (not necessarily a single company monetizing it). We have several in use by long-running open source database projects that have not felt a need to jump on proprietary source-available licensing, even though firms like AWS are indeed using their code and selling services. AWS (and other big firms with hosted services) are also sponsoring those DBs with code and/or money, but in many cases the basic model predates the big push to the cloud, and other downstream businesses were doing that before AWS and other cloud hosts.
- dehrmann 3y ago
  What you're sort of proposing is cloud SaaSaaS. AWS would build out hooks for providers to manage the DBs they sell so they look like part of AWS. The main problem is AWS already has most of the services most of their customers want, so there isn't a big market opportunity.
dragonwriter 3y ago
> And that’s also how DB companies try to monetize Open source DBs have been around a while, though. A minority of them trying to pay the bills with monopoly rents on hosted services is… much newer. Its how VC-backed DB-as-central-tech startups try to monetize, and, yeah, if you are going to do that, you need a proprietary license. But don’t expect people to treat your DB like an open source DB, then, either. You can be Oracle instead of Postgres, but you can’t also expect to get treated like Postgres, instead of Oracle.

thayne 3y ago

Perhaps we need a different way to fund database development (not necessarily a single company monetizing it). If the service you provide is hosting DBs, you are are at an inherent disadvantage competing with hosted db offerings form your potential customers' cloud provider. Even if your product is technically superior in every way, you are another entity they have to do business with (billing, support, contracts, security evaluations, etc.), which adds friction, and either you host on your own infrastructure, which means higher network latency, and network costs to get data to and from your customer's cloud, or you have hosting options that run inside all the major cloud providers, in any regions your customers use, which means you (or your customer) ends up paying the hyperscaler for the infrastructure, and you have the added complexity of having to know how to manage it on multiple cloud platforms. And there there is also the fact that it is much more difficult for you to build integration with the cloud's IAM or other services. Basically, most cloud customers would rather use a service that is part of the cloud platform than from another provider. Ideally, instead of competing with the hyperscalers, they would sell some service to the hyperscalers that have the ir own hosted services. But I don't know how to get there. As a brief sidenote, AFAICT this isn't what happened with the hashicorp license change, for them it seems like the pressure largely came from startups, not the big cloud companies.

dragonwriter 3y ago
> Perhaps we need a different way to fund database development (not necessarily a single company monetizing it). We have several in use by long-running open source database projects that have not felt a need to jump on proprietary source-available licensing, even though firms like AWS are indeed using their code and selling services. AWS (and other big firms with hosted services) are also sponsoring those DBs with code and/or money, but in many cases the basic model predates the big push to the cloud, and other downstream businesses were doing that before AWS and other cloud hosts.
dehrmann 3y ago
What you're sort of proposing is cloud SaaSaaS. AWS would build out hooks for providers to manage the DBs they sell so they look like part of AWS. The main problem is AWS already has most of the services most of their customers want, so there isn't a big market opportunity.

dragonwriter 3y ago

> And that’s also how DB companies try to monetize Open source DBs have been around a while, though. A minority of them trying to pay the bills with monopoly rents on hosted services is… much newer. Its how VC-backed DB-as-central-tech startups try to monetize, and, yeah, if you are going to do that, you need a proprietary license. But don’t expect people to treat your DB like an open source DB, then, either. You can be Oracle instead of Postgres, but you can’t also expect to get treated like Postgres, instead of Oracle.