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AWS, MongoDB, and the Economic Realities of Open Source

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Re: AWS, MongoDB, and the Economic Realities of Open Source

#21

Post by matwood »

BossingAround wrote: post #6
dhh2106 wrote: post #2

I work on an open core business model, and we spend a fair amount of time thinking about ways to prevent third parties from stealing our lunch. CockroachDB has an interesting model, where they've tried to closely couple their open source and premium products. This coupling makes it harder for third parties to build against the open source and even easier for enterprises to use it. Do people here have examples of comp…

But why did Red Hat succeed then? (this is a genuine question, I'd have guessed IBM would re-package RH's products, and Oracle failed with their Unbreakable Linux)

To put it succinctly, Red Hat doesn't sell Linux, they sell expertise in Linux.

Re: AWS, MongoDB, and the Economic Realities of Open Source

#22

Post by houseofzeus »

BossingAround wrote: post #6
dhh2106 wrote: post #2

I work on an open core business model, and we spend a fair amount of time thinking about ways to prevent third parties from stealing our lunch. CockroachDB has an interesting model, where they've tried to closely couple their open source and premium products. This coupling makes it harder for third parties to build against the open source and even easier for enterprises to use it. Do people here have examples of comp…

But why did Red Hat succeed then? (this is a genuine question, I'd have guessed IBM would re-package RH's products, and Oracle failed with their Unbreakable Linux)

The big difference between Red Hat and a lot of these other companies is that if you look at a lot of their products, including the cash cow (RHEL), there is not a 1:1 mapping between the product and a single open source project.

Rather they create enterprise distributions that are made up of a number of open source projects that are (ideally) integrated into a solution. This combined with the right investment in support and training provides a product that is more compelling than "we provide a signed version of $UPSTREAM_PROJECT". I would say OEL is successful for the amount Oracle appear to invest in it (not much).

Timing helps a lot too though, in that they had a lot of success before the advent of the public cloud so are in a better position to weather the storm while they figure out a new model.

Re: AWS, MongoDB, and the Economic Realities of Open Source

#23

Post by mdpopescu »

donatj wrote: post #11

Honestly at this point I would rather use Closed Source software than Open Source that isn’t “Free as in Speech”. It’s a wolf in sheep’s clothing. At least closed source is honest about its intentions. I use Free Software not because the price, but rather so I can be Free. So I can know I am free to use software I develop with it in whatever way I want. I find the push to market open source by limiting it’s use one o…

No. The best is the enemy of the good. I do not want to live in North Korea rather than (say) in the UK, because at least the NK government is honest about its intentions.

Re: AWS, MongoDB, and the Economic Realities of Open Source

#24

Post by matwood »

avar wrote: post #20

> It is hard to imagine [AWS, Microsoft, and Google] ever paying for open source software. It's surprising that someone setting out to write about the changing economies of open source ends up missing the point so thoroughly. These companies are some of the biggest contributors to open source. What they aren't likely to want to pay for is a site license from some company trying to sell them a MongoDB under terms prac…

I agree. It's important to point out specifically that many companies are paying for OSS with developer time instead of money. IMO, that is better than money and fits the OSS ethos.

Re: AWS, MongoDB, and the Economic Realities of Open Source

#25

Post by scaryclam »

z3t4 wrote: post #16

How easy is it to migrate to or away from a cloud service like AWS ? I think the end-game for these cloud giants is to lock you in, so that you simply can't switch to a commodity provider.

How you design your system will dictate how easy or hard it is to move. I've always been an advocate of making sure the design is agnostic to where it's running. Problems with moving start coming up if you've tied yourself tightly to specific services, or ways of working. That's not to say you shouldn't use those services, many are really very useful, just be aware of, and have a plan on how to move away from them (if you need to).

Re: AWS, MongoDB, and the Economic Realities of Open Source

#26

Post by matwood »

z3t4 wrote: post #16

How easy is it to migrate to or away from a cloud service like AWS ? I think the end-game for these cloud giants is to lock you in, so that you simply can't switch to a commodity provider.

Depends if you are using the value add services. AWS is much larger than EC2 and S3, but if you only stick to those it is pretty easy to move around.

Re: AWS, MongoDB, and the Economic Realities of Open Source

#27

Post by zozbot123 »

KaoruAoiShiho wrote: post #5

Agreed, the dream of a megacap open source company is dead. Mongodb shows this, the Unity fiasco (I'm surprised nobody has put the two together) shows this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18874400 Guys, charge for your work. Don't place the economic value of your company to be ancillary to your product. That just invites another company that has that ancillary as their core competency to come and do it much bet…

Why would you expect a viable open source company to be a "megacap" anyway? The whole point of the open source development model is that, properly applied, it's more efficient and less costly than its closed-source alternative, while delivering significantly more value to its userbase. By contrast, the complementary services that an OSS-focused company actively sells (such as support) are in fact quite expensive. You wouldn't expect a support business to be "megacap", unless it actually manages to reach IBM- or RedHat-scale, which by definition very few businesses ever will.

The real competition is not Unreal vs. Unity, but both Unreal and Unity vs. e.g. Blender. (Which was actually funded as an open source project by its users, back in the day. But at a relatively low 'valuation', compared to Unity!)

Re: AWS, MongoDB, and the Economic Realities of Open Source

#28

Post by zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC »

donatj wrote: post #11

Honestly at this point I would rather use Closed Source software than Open Source that isn’t “Free as in Speech”. It’s a wolf in sheep’s clothing. At least closed source is honest about its intentions. I use Free Software not because the price, but rather so I can be Free. So I can know I am free to use software I develop with it in whatever way I want. I find the push to market open source by limiting it’s use one o…

Really, it's simply not Open Source software, that's nothing more than a marketing lie, so we should stop calling it that.

Re: AWS, MongoDB, and the Economic Realities of Open Source

#29

Post by Beltiras »

I don't see why big companies like Google, AWS and the like wouldn't fund open source development, precisely because they have realized great returns using those softwares to reap monetary benefit. If I were a CEO and my core business was built on OSS, I would allocate budget to help the projects used within my organization. It's just common sense to do so. Reality might be different but then that makes for some really short sighted decision making on behalf of those companies.

Re: AWS, MongoDB, and the Economic Realities of Open Source

#30

Post by BrentOzar »

avar wrote: post #20

> It is hard to imagine [AWS, Microsoft, and Google] ever paying for open source software. It's surprising that someone setting out to write about the changing economies of open source ends up missing the point so thoroughly. These companies are some of the biggest contributors to open source. What they aren't likely to want to pay for is a site license from some company trying to sell them a MongoDB under terms prac…

> These companies are some of the biggest contributors to open source.

I wouldn't expect AWS to make a lot of code contributions to MongoDB when they've built something else that's 3.6 compatible, though. It's not like they're going to make contributions to a new, incompatible version of MongoDB. They've already made the call to fork.

I agree with what you're saying about other products, but not this particular case.

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