Is it possible to let people use software freely, but if they make money from a service that uses it, you have to pay for it? This seems to me to be the fairest approach, particularly in a hosted environment. Think of something like codepen.io but instead of premium pricing they only charge you when you process payments. In a way, this is what the App Store and Play Store are already doing, no?
AWS, MongoDB, and the Economic Realities of Open Source
31–40 of 257 posts
Re: AWS, MongoDB, and the Economic Realities of Open Source
#32When you give money to redhat, you buy insurance that if you encounter a problem, they will support you. It is expencive, but there is clearly a lot of work involved in producing new release. IMHO redhat deserves its money.
When you give money to Oracle, you are financing lawyers who try to find the best way to make you pay more without improving the software.
Re: AWS, MongoDB, and the Economic Realities of Open Source
#33Agreed, 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…
> more efficient and less costly than its closed-source alternative
This is just not true in reality. Open source projects cost generally the same as closed source projects. Companies like mongo and unity employs about the same amount of engineers to work on it and the idea of high cost savings due to thousands of randos contributing code is vastly exaggerated. Same cost + no profit + having to develop a secondary core competency in a competitive commodity business like support and hosting = dangerous and non-scalable model.
Also never heard of a game using the Blender game engine...
Re: AWS, MongoDB, and the Economic Realities of Open Source
#34How 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.
When we embarked on our migration into AWS, we thought about this pretty carefully. There wasn't anything that we couldn't move in a year. That provides a sufficient backstop (IMO) to anything becoming untenable in the AWS ecosystem. Most everything could be moved in a handful of weeks of effort, or at least enough parts to achieve the reason to move.
AWS is still in a battle for market share; I think they're extremely "friendly" to their customers at this phase of the game. Will that change in a half-decade or decade? Maybe, but I think they're earning their profits now and likely to continue to do so.
Re: AWS, MongoDB, and the Economic Realities of Open Source
#35Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Arguable this is what MongoDB, Inc. sells as well. A big part of their package for enterprise clients is optimization and consulting services.
Re: AWS, MongoDB, and the Economic Realities of Open Source
#36Why can't MongoDB can't compete with AWS? Aside from cloud vendor lock-in, and economies of scale that AWS has. Curious if anyone here has experience with hosting using Mongo's enterprise offering. The article makes the point that Amazon is targeting a lower version of the API, can't the enterprise version compete on features?
Re: AWS, MongoDB, and the Economic Realities of Open Source
#37Agreed, 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…
I don't know if blender is comparable at all. There's a lot more to a game engine than rendering, and AFAIK blender is not even intended for real time animation. Ogre is an open source 3d engine, although I don't know about its funding: https://www.ogre3d.org/
Re: AWS, MongoDB, and the Economic Realities of Open Source
#38I 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 real…
Disclosure: I work on Google Cloud.
Actually, we do precisely this. Google contributes heavily to Linux, KVM, LLVM, and so on in addition to the open source projects we launched (Android, Chromium, Kubernetes to name some popular ones).
Our marketing team decided to highlight this on https://cloud.google.com/open-cloud/ which does an okay job. Feedback welcome, and I’ll pass it along to them.
Re: AWS, MongoDB, and the Economic Realities of Open Source
#39> 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.
Well yeah, that's the point. MongoDB's business model before was trying to sell Amazon CD's. Then they turned the screws on that and switched to an even more onerous license that a company like Amazon wasn't going to accept, so they wrote their own replacement.
If it's an economic lesson in anything it's that companies and individual open source users alike are going to be a lot more careful about using any project where one for-profit company demands copyright assignment and can re-license the project at any time to squeeze existing users.
MongoDB's bet was that they had enough of a moat that Amazon et al would fold up and accept their new terms, that was obviously miscalculated, but there still might be other similar cloud companies who'll fold.
But both Amazon and other users are going to be a lot more careful in the future to not run critical infrastructure on some project that's likely to be subject to a future bait & switch by upstream.
Re: AWS, MongoDB, and the Economic Realities of Open Source
#40Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
I don't know if blender is comparable at all. There's a lot more to a game engine than rendering, and AFAIK blender is not even intended for real time animation. Ogre is an open source 3d engine, although I don't know about its funding: https://www.ogre3d.org/
Maybe Godot engine is more comparable?