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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

#91

Post by nacs »

pweissbrod wrote: post #67
reacweb wrote: post #32

When 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.

"IMHO redhat deserves its money". I agree. But the vast majority of people employ CentOS which is redhats derivative. Oracle engineers work hard on java and deserve their money but the vast majority of people employ OpenJDK which is OracleJDKs derivative.

OpenJDK is a pretty significant rewrite of the Sun/Oracle JDK to stay open and completely GPL.

CentOS is more of a repackaging of Redhat -- the binary files are almost exactly the same there so the comparison isn't quite valid.

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

#92

Post by marcinzm »

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…

MongoDB's new license does not in any way prevent you from using MongoDB in whatever way you want. It simply requires you to, in some cases, release the changes you make to it publicly. You know, like the GPL did before companies found that a SaaS model let's you side step the release changes requirement.

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

#93

Post by raxxorrax »

gbear605 wrote: post #53
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.

Very possible. They do it with retail too to conquer the market. Very successfully because they have laziness on their side.

You can bet that they don't care about some millions for development. On the contrary, it will help saving taxes.

Amazons behavior has been an amazing long-term, something many companies are thoroughly lacking.

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

#94

Post by p10_user »

tanilama wrote: post #59
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 mone…

> Isn't this by itself an oxymoron?

Presumably that's why, in the words of the parent poster, the dream is dead.

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

#95

Post by jrumbut »

pjc50 wrote: post #14

Two comments: Firstly, the discussion at the front about the music industry is quite insightful, but I'd go further - they didn't want to sell convenience at first. Used to the physical embodiment of recordings rather than the de-materialized reality of digital music, they spent years working on mandated inconvenience through DRM and other legal actions. Always remember that if the music industry had won unopposed yo…

I think the use of revenue is a little disingenuous.

Producing, packing, and shipping a physical copy and marketing on broadcast television were major expenses of the pre-2000 world that they no longer have to the same extent (maybe they still buy TV ads but I haven't seen one in a decade at least, used to be all over the place). If you keep smaller part of $12 or a larger part of $0.99 your revenue could fall with profits staying the same.

Maybe the overall picture stays the same but this was very distracting for me from the argument made in the article. It made me wonder what else isn't quite right.

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

#96

Post by yesimahuman »

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…

I'd like to think we're doing something new at Ionic, primarily because we're frontend rather than backend focused.

One big part of our business now is licensing Native SDK connectors/libs. For example, secure authentication that utilizes biometric auth and keystore/keychain functionality. Those aren't open source but any serious enterprise needs that if they are building an app with the open source Ionic Framework, and our target developer has no interest in writing native code to do this themselves. This is also interesting because enterprises are actively wanting us to build, support, and license out key client-side functionality for their apps.

That alignment of free for the community with addons that only make sense for the enterprise has worked well for us so far and I believe the frontend focus keeps us far enough away from the "hosted OSS" problem described here for Mongo.

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

#97

Post by kgwxd »

scarface74 wrote: post #76
pjc50 wrote: post #14

Two comments: Firstly, the discussion at the front about the music industry is quite insightful, but I'd go further - they didn't want to sell convenience at first. Used to the physical embodiment of recordings rather than the de-materialized reality of digital music, they spent years working on mandated inconvenience through DRM and other legal actions. Always remember that if the music industry had won unopposed yo…

I realize that the idea of “Commoditizing Your Complements” has gained new life lately on HN, but let’s give credit where it’s due - Joel Spolsky in 2002. https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/06/12/strategy-letter-v/

Credit for what?

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

#98

Post by dstroot »

pjc50 wrote: post #68
pweissbrod wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"IMHO redhat deserves its money". I agree. But the vast majority of people employ CentOS which is redhats derivative. Oracle engineers work hard on java and deserve their money but the vast majority of people employ OpenJDK which is OracleJDKs derivative.

For a long period of time I regarded Oracle as absolutely undeserving owners of the JDK; they didn't write it, it was bought from Sun, they shipped adware in the installer, tried to sue Android out of existence, and were poor stewards of the language.

You wrote in the past tense. Did something change your view?

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

#99

Post by mynegation »

kgwxd wrote: post #97
scarface74 wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I realize that the idea of “Commoditizing Your Complements” has gained new life lately on HN, but let’s give credit where it’s due - Joel Spolsky in 2002. https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/06/12/strategy-letter-v/

Credit for what?

For “commoditize your complements” strategy, which was probably popularized by Stratechery but GP found earlier piece by Joel Spolsky about the same idea.

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

#100

Post by rglover »

Open source works if you:

- Treat your OSS projects like MARKETING tools, not revenue streams.

- Offer a freemium version of what you produce (e.g., offering a "Pro" version that's well-maintained and adds valuable features).

- Back your projects with services (e.g., consulting, fast support, "off the shelf" implementations, enterprise workshops, etc.).

- Back your projects with paid support.

- Scale your performance expectations of the business to the cash flow of your services.

If you want to make money off of OSS, you have to run a business. It's the responsibility of the project's creators to deliver products and services utilizing their technology to provide something better than others can (and charge for it).

Otherwise, keep it closed source.

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