AWS, MongoDB, and the Economic Realities of Open Source • Hacker News Board

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

#161

Post by cmsj » Mon, Jan 14, 2019, 7:34 PM UTC

infinite8s wrote: post #148

Beltiras wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's very good. Does Google also donate money to OSS projects they use? Postgres? Redis? uWSGI? Gunicorn? MySQL? I'd imagine they are heavily used in many projects within Google.

They aren't used.

Google definitely uses MySQL (e.g. https://www.mysql.com/customers/view/?id=555) and offers a MySQL deployment/management as a Service in GCloud. No idea what, if any, their contributions back to upstream have been, but I know they've been using it for important internal stuff for years, so I would be very surprised if, at the very least, no patches have come from out from the chocolate factory doors.

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

#162

Post by manigandham » Mon, Jan 14, 2019, 7:37 PM UTC

This whole thing is a race as software itself gets better and better. Just think about how hard it was to run things 5 years ago before the rapid rise of containers and orchestrators. One person with Kubernetes can easily run a large cluster with hundreds of applications, even with private owned hardware. And this is all free now.

Being ahead of the curve with proprietary products is a viable business but just not as big as these companies want it to be. Meanwhile there are thousands of smaller boutique software firms solving problems and making great profits.

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

#163

Post by tfolbrecht » Mon, Jan 14, 2019, 8:10 PM UTC

alittletooraph wrote: post #155

tfolbrecht wrote: post #134

MongoDB is choosing a dinosaurs business model, and it's going to hurt them and their ecology. Mongo the org should play MongoDB like Google does Kubernetes, Golang, Chromium, etc. Have your people in there, funded, steering the project as 'FOSS' while you release actual products. Mongo dropped the ball by having no on-ramp product like GCPs Firebase. Their Cloud provider hate is just a flailing reaction to bad busin…

The article mentions that MongoDB already has its own hosted database service, Atlas.

It does, I've used it, I even have the socks, but it's a managed Database product. It's not equivalent to Firebase, AWS Lightsail, Digital Ocean One-click, etc. So a new MERN developer isn't going to gravitate toward that.

It's more like AWS RDS for MongoDB.

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

#164

Post by skywhopper » Mon, Jan 14, 2019, 8:12 PM UTC

BrentOzar wrote: post #30

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.

I'm not sure how much AWS contributes back to Redis or Elasticsearch, but in this case, MongoDB has already made the decision for them. AWS certainly won't be contributing to MongoDB, but it's not on AWS from now on.

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

#165

Post by robotsquidward » Mon, Jan 14, 2019, 8:13 PM UTC

I'm the furthest thing from a lawyer, but wouldn't it be nice to say my software is open source, and you can use it in your software, but if the software product you're selling with my software in it is making over $X, you have to pay $X?

Or, even more generally, is there a legal way to protect your code from being taken advantage of by the top 1% of companies? Could that become popular?

If I help a million developers and companies make money, fine, but it is immensely frustrating how the Amazons and Googles of the world reap so much of the benefit.

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

#166

Post by kevinStorj » Mon, Jan 14, 2019, 8:16 PM UTC

AmericanChopper wrote: post #135

kevinAtStorj wrote: post #132

I find it interesting that the price of storage has essentially flatlined for the past five years, although the cost of hard drives have decreased by about 50 percent over that same timeframe dollar-per-gigabyte ( https://www.forbes.com/sites/tomcoughlin/2017/12/20/digital-... ). Innovations at the 'business' layer may be the best way to compete with AWS, in the way that it captures a large chunk of value generated t…

Perhaps this is a good idea in theory, but it’s lacking in implementation. Having used Storj in the past, I’ve found it to be the least reliable service I’ve ever used. The SLA excludes events beyond your control, which sadly includes the availability of your storage network. I wouldn’t say this solution is even close to being production ready.

Storj has spent the last year rebuilding the entire network after hiring JT Olio (Director of Engineering) Ben Golub (Interim CEO, previously CEO of Docker).

The V3 Network is leaps and bounds more performant and economical than the V2 Network. It is compatible with the S3 bucket-object store and is an easy shift for applications already using S3 as an object store layer. You can speed test it vs S3 using the ./cmd/s3-benchmark tool in our distro.

Try it out for yourself: https://storj.io/blog/2019/01/getting-started-with-the-storj...

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

#167

Post by justicezyx » Mon, Jan 14, 2019, 8:28 PM UTC

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…

> Open source software is by definition commoditized.

I thought commodity means something that can be produced by many different companies without substantial differences in cost, quality, functionality etc.

Open source software usually is siganificant in their complexity and utility. Also they have strong gluing effect to customers' own code.

To say they are commodity in the sense that they are free of charge, seems not the right way of thinking them as commodity.

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

#168

Post by sytse » Mon, Jan 14, 2019, 8:52 PM UTC

The 'Why Software Should Be Free' case assumes the software exists at all. I think this is the case for a lot of common infrastructure software and I think these will continue to move to open source.

But without a license payment much software might not be available at all.

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

#169

Post by talkingtab » Mon, Jan 14, 2019, 8:58 PM UTC

cmsj wrote: post #154

talkingtab wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good points, and I may not have said this well, (and here's the obligatory but ) but... - I am not proposing to "protect OSS companies over the freedom of ...". Rather I am attempting to explore a way to provide a boundary between the entire OSS community (users/developers, etc) and those companies that attempt to exploit that community. As others have pointed out, there are many companies that make a contribution to…

I would love it if more companies would get involved with FOSS communities, either by sponsoring work, or getting involved directly, but I would still argue that it's against the spirit of FOSS (and the letter of most licenses) to try and force them to. When we choose to put our software out in the world under permissive licenses, we can't really turn around and complain when people make use of it in ways that are be…

I agree your sentiment in general and especially with the last sentences ... It is one of the reasons I'm interested in trying to find some way(s) that we ensure they (the individuals and small groups) have some appropriate reward and that they are not exploited. I'm really not familiar with mongoDB and I don't use it, but I suspect that it started out as a person or small group that grew and grew and helped many people until ...

But perhaps exploit is too strong a word? It certainly seems that at least Amazon is acting as a bad citizen in this case by taking more than they are giving back. And it is within the realm of possibility that they will damage this project - the EEE syndrome is one possibility.

But yes to the respect, gratitude and sadly the insignificant donations as well.

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

#170

Post by scarface74 » Mon, Jan 14, 2019, 8:58 PM UTC

meekins wrote: post #50

scaryclam wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 (i…

This of course depends on how central the app you are building is to your business and how long lifespan you expect. If it's your core product and you expect a lifespan of > 5 years, not getting tied in with a single cloud vendor is smart. Usually that implies some kind of stack where the highest level of abstraction is a set of containers or VMs. But when for example doing software consulting for a company whose cor…

This of course depends on how central the app you are building is to your business and how long lifespan you expect. If it's your core product and you expect a lifespan of > 5 years, not getting tied in with a single cloud vendor is smart. Usually that implies some kind of stack where the highest level of abstraction is a set of containers or VMs.

Congratulations, now you have the worse of all worlds. You’re paying more for hosting VMs than you would for baremetal at a colo, you’re not saving money by letting the cloud provider do the “undifferentiated heavy lifting” and your developers aren’t moving faster by depending on the cloud providers services.