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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

#51

Post by awirth »

vnorilo wrote: post #37
zozbot123 wrote: post #27

Earlier 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/

Blender has a full game engine included in it, although it looks like it's getting cut with the next release: https://www.blender.org/features/game-creation/

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

#53

Post by gbear605 »

nwhatt wrote: post #36

Why 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?

I know nothing about MongoDB pricing, but it’s possible that Amazon is taking a loss on DocumentDB to keep companies using solely AWS products, while MongoDB Inc. obviously can’t do that since they have no other revenue stream. So the competition might be both convenience and price vs features. Features sounds likely to lose that battle.

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

#54

Post by duggan »

nwhatt wrote: post #36

Why 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?

Other than multi-document transactions, many of the changes to MongoDB since 3.6 are to do with performance and scaling - this is AWS' bread and butter.

Something to consider is how many applications depends on cutting edge database features. Developers often consider a database an object persistence mechanism whose details are to be tidied away. See, for example, the emphasis on database portability in ORMs.

MongoDB's most effective enterprise offering is support, in my opinion. They know their database well, which can make a big difference if your company is heavily reliant on it.

I suspect for many users though, AWS support will be good enough. Presumably, that's the danger to MongoDB.

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

#55

Post by jeffbax »

nwhatt wrote: post #36

Why 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?

I would not underestimate those two advantages. Even Microsoft and Google are getting outpaced by them overall. It might only be that Amazon competes with so many companies anymore that they choose the second and third place solutions.

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

#56

Post by zozbot123 »

KaoruAoiShiho wrote: post #33
zozbot123 wrote: post #27

Earlier 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…

> 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 co…

> Open source projects cost generally the same as closed source projects.

https://www.linux.com/publications/estimating-total-cost-lin... (mind you, that's 2008 data. I couldn't find more recent estimates)

Mongo is quite unrepresentative here - not least, because they're selling the very same software (MongoDB) under both OSS and proprietary licensing! A better comparison in the database space would be e.g. PostgresSQL - the latest versions of which, BTW, are including "NoSQL"-focused features that make it quite competitive with the likes of MongoDB.

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

#57

Post by gbear605 »

geggam wrote: post #45
sokoloff wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 extreme…

At scale you need to move out of the cloud. Once you hit a certain point there is no economic gain.

I believe Netflix and Apple use AWS, so I’m not so sure about that.

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

#58

Post by sokoloff »

gbear605 wrote: post #57
geggam wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At scale you need to move out of the cloud. Once you hit a certain point there is no economic gain.

I believe Netflix and Apple use AWS, so I’m not so sure about that.

Netflix runs their application on AWS.

They do not stream out of AWS (because AWS bandwidth is too expensive for that application).

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

#59

Post by tanilama »

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…

> megacap open source company

Isn't this by itself an oxymoron? Open source isn't shouldn't be one's marketing stunt to gain attention, if you want to charge your software make it proprietary and charge people for license. Using open source as a last resort bait isn't cool.

My only jab at Amazon is that they should give back their code to the community or they need to be forced to do so, not that they can't make money from OSS software, if that is what license at the time, permits.

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

#60

Post by cat199 »

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…

> the dream of a megacap open source company is dead

    https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/RHT/
    Market Cap	31.055B
    S&P 500 Component
Or does this exemplify your point w/r/t RH for-fee bolt-on addons?
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