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this is getting ridiculous, first mongo.db next nginx. HEADLINES FROM NEXT WEEK: cat raises $750M at valuation of $25B The venerable gnu shell program 'cat',

this is getting ridiculous, first mongo.db next nginx. HEADLINES FROM NEXT WEEK: cat raises $750M at valuation of $25B The venerable gnu shell program 'cat', which is an integral part of 70 million developers' toolchains and helps power shell scripts on 70% of the world's Internet servers, has completed raising a seed round of $750M at a valuation of $25B. "We could have raised more", said Richard Stallman, "but by only parting with 3.3% we are leaving ourselves room to grow. More and more people are starting to use Gnu/GNU utilities, and our eventual market base is 7 billion people. We have no plans to monetize."

fragsworth 13y ago
Mongo and nginx are both fairly complex tools. They stand to make lots of money from large organizations that want to optimize their back-end. If generic webcorp X is paying $1 million per year in server costs, and you can reduce those costs by 10% for $100,000 with some new feature... webcorp X will pay you for that feature.
- dschiptsov 13y ago
  Please do not put nginx and crap like mongodb in the same basket. nginx won its user-base solely due to brilliant engineering, attention to details and superior code quality, while mongodb "success" is based on using deceptive sales techniques and media manipulations. There are hundreds of blog posts that describe in great details all the pitfalls and bad design withing mongodb, along with their cheating with benchmarks and calling "transactions" non-atomic writes, etc. It is no use to describe all the details here. Use Google search.)
  - diziet 13y ago
    What were the specific cases of Mongodb doing 'media manipulations', dschiptsov? I am curious to read up on the history.
    - dschiptsov 13y ago
      In short, the strategy was to develop a brand instead of code. It is nothing wrong to have a brand when you already have a superior design or innovative technology, not the other way around. One of such manipulations were so-called benchmarks when in a mode in which the control returns to a caller function before an I/O operation is finished, successfully or not, without any error checking, which has to be done by calling a separate function explicitly. Basically, what did they measured was the performance of writing into a memory buffers. There was later some nonsense about default mode of operation, and when you really need your data consistent you should turn on a synchronous mode. The story of table-level write locks is less dramatic.) But the stories of "customer satisfaction", "increased productivity" (never to see an error) "features to jump-start the development" (by ignoring how your data is stored) were all over the site and paid content mills like techcrunch. In case there are questions about design here is the link: http://hackingdistributed.com/2013/01/29/mongo-ft/ http://hackingdistributed.com/2013/01/29/mongo-ft/ Keep in mind that this very crap is now "valued" at a sum compared to a budget of small country. In case you don't get it, the design of a fault-tolerant storage engine is a much harder problem. Serious systems, such as Informix at its time, resorted to write data in a chunks they call "pages" on so-called raw-devices (without any buffering by OS or hardware). They had page-level instead of row-level locking, and in case of failure they knew which pages were written and which not, so they could rollback the unfinished transactions. btw, they used the same pages for shared memory operations. This was a technology IBM brought for a billion dollars back in 2000. Compared to that MongoDB is just a Herbalife or any other scam.
      - fragsworth 13y ago
        I can see being angry about their marketing tactics, but MongoDB has been around for a while now and it's arguably the best choice for a NoSQL database simply because it's so popular. I wouldn't let the notion of code cleanliness or "proper engineering" get in the way of making a sound business decision for your tech. Being the most popular database means you've got lots of large companies using it, satisfied with its reliability, and you get plenty of extra features written by 3rd parties when you need them. And web searching will find answers to your problems, when you have them, way better than with a lesser-known database.
yeukhon 13y ago
How is that ridiculous? Why can't nginx or MongoDB monetize its strength? 10gen was a startup and MongoDB was built to make money. You can keep a project "open source" while offering enterprise level of support. Look at Puppet, Chef and now Ansible. The world needs business. Nginx is mature and actually deserve to run as a business. The developers are already consultant for a long time; they just want to monetize Nginx publicly, as a startup. Are you afraid Nginx will become the next Microsoft Windows Server? I can't predict future but with 100% of faith I say nginx will be fine in the next several years. I don't necessarily think free software == win.
- voltagex_ 13y ago
  If I'm a small business that can't afford "enterprise" pricing and nginx starts stagnating because all of the effort has gone to nginx-plus, what then?
  - junker37 13y ago
    Then you choose another open source offering or fork nginx and start implementing the features it's missing.
    - pbreit 13y ago
      And that totally sucks.
  - skj 13y ago
    Then you realize that they don't owe you anything.
  - yeukhon 13y ago
    Well, in that case, you are okay with the last version of free nginx for several more years. If you use Ubuntu server for example, it ships with outdated version. A lot of companies use that (for stability and security reason). And I predict half of the developers will protest and negotiate with Nginx Inc. to get a fork version. Don't panic. I think it is solid enough for few years. What if half of the world is destroyed tomorrow? Well, that's a disaster.

fragsworth 13y ago

Mongo and nginx are both fairly complex tools. They stand to make lots of money from large organizations that want to optimize their back-end. If generic webcorp X is paying $1 million per year in server costs, and you can reduce those costs by 10% for $100,000 with some new feature... webcorp X will pay you for that feature.

dschiptsov 13y ago
Please do not put nginx and crap like mongodb in the same basket. nginx won its user-base solely due to brilliant engineering, attention to details and superior code quality, while mongodb "success" is based on using deceptive sales techniques and media manipulations. There are hundreds of blog posts that describe in great details all the pitfalls and bad design withing mongodb, along with their cheating with benchmarks and calling "transactions" non-atomic writes, etc. It is no use to describe all the details here. Use Google search.)
- diziet 13y ago
  What were the specific cases of Mongodb doing 'media manipulations', dschiptsov? I am curious to read up on the history.
  - dschiptsov 13y ago
    In short, the strategy was to develop a brand instead of code. It is nothing wrong to have a brand when you already have a superior design or innovative technology, not the other way around. One of such manipulations were so-called benchmarks when in a mode in which the control returns to a caller function before an I/O operation is finished, successfully or not, without any error checking, which has to be done by calling a separate function explicitly. Basically, what did they measured was the performance of writing into a memory buffers. There was later some nonsense about default mode of operation, and when you really need your data consistent you should turn on a synchronous mode. The story of table-level write locks is less dramatic.) But the stories of "customer satisfaction", "increased productivity" (never to see an error) "features to jump-start the development" (by ignoring how your data is stored) were all over the site and paid content mills like techcrunch. In case there are questions about design here is the link: http://hackingdistributed.com/2013/01/29/mongo-ft/ http://hackingdistributed.com/2013/01/29/mongo-ft/ Keep in mind that this very crap is now "valued" at a sum compared to a budget of small country. In case you don't get it, the design of a fault-tolerant storage engine is a much harder problem. Serious systems, such as Informix at its time, resorted to write data in a chunks they call "pages" on so-called raw-devices (without any buffering by OS or hardware). They had page-level instead of row-level locking, and in case of failure they knew which pages were written and which not, so they could rollback the unfinished transactions. btw, they used the same pages for shared memory operations. This was a technology IBM brought for a billion dollars back in 2000. Compared to that MongoDB is just a Herbalife or any other scam.
    - fragsworth 13y ago
      I can see being angry about their marketing tactics, but MongoDB has been around for a while now and it's arguably the best choice for a NoSQL database simply because it's so popular. I wouldn't let the notion of code cleanliness or "proper engineering" get in the way of making a sound business decision for your tech. Being the most popular database means you've got lots of large companies using it, satisfied with its reliability, and you get plenty of extra features written by 3rd parties when you need them. And web searching will find answers to your problems, when you have them, way better than with a lesser-known database.

yeukhon 13y ago

How is that ridiculous? Why can't nginx or MongoDB monetize its strength? 10gen was a startup and MongoDB was built to make money. You can keep a project "open source" while offering enterprise level of support. Look at Puppet, Chef and now Ansible. The world needs business. Nginx is mature and actually deserve to run as a business. The developers are already consultant for a long time; they just want to monetize Nginx publicly, as a startup. Are you afraid Nginx will become the next Microsoft Windows Server? I can't predict future but with 100% of faith I say nginx will be fine in the next several years. I don't necessarily think free software == win.

voltagex_ 13y ago
If I'm a small business that can't afford "enterprise" pricing and nginx starts stagnating because all of the effort has gone to nginx-plus, what then?
- junker37 13y ago
  Then you choose another open source offering or fork nginx and start implementing the features it's missing.
  - pbreit 13y ago
    And that totally sucks.
- skj 13y ago
  Then you realize that they don't owe you anything.
- yeukhon 13y ago
  Well, in that case, you are okay with the last version of free nginx for several more years. If you use Ubuntu server for example, it ships with outdated version. A lot of companies use that (for stability and security reason). And I predict half of the developers will protest and negotiate with Nginx Inc. to get a fork version. Don't panic. I think it is solid enough for few years. What if half of the world is destroyed tomorrow? Well, that's a disaster.