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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

#181

Post by ojosilva »

Mostly FUD of a supposed opensource monetization debacle on the aftermath of Amazon DocumentDB.

Not every opensource monetization scheme is the same. Mongo and Gitlab are not the same. One is mission-critical production software, the other is a productivity tool (which can become critical, but in a different manner), thus different ways to monetize. Hashicorp, Canonical, Mesosphere and NodeBB are not nearly the same. Why put everyone on the same pot?

Opensource is not an industry. Opensource is a guarantee, a certificate of transparency. Opensource is global-scale collaboration. And much more.

Neither is everyone moving everything to fully-managed PaaS, at least not in the way described by the OP, who assumes a lot of givens there. Many use cloud infrastructure, but not all the services, some have private clouds or other hybrid setups.

Application platforms are constantly changing, why now assume Mongo or any other opensource models are doomed? MongoDB Inc. is a public company and is perfectly capable of defending their bottom line against a magnificently sized but over-committed competitor like AWS. Mongo has NOT done a good job with their PaaS or enterprise tooling so far, competitors have popped up, so now they have to up their game, that's all.

To underestimate OSS monetization is very presumptuous. To compare musical recordings, an end to itself, to infrastructure mission-critical software is downright stupid.

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

#182

Post by greycol »

justicezyx wrote: post #167
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…

You can't treat open source software as a commodity but you can treat any version of open source software as a commodity.

i.e. debian and ubuntu may not be interchangable commodities but ubuntu 16.04 from a torrent vs given from a friend vs downloaded from a mirror are interchangeable.

The services around opensource software such as troubleshooting or being able to spin up a server without having to supply anything but a password (and cash) are what makes a specific version differentiable, not who supplied the bits of that version. Since opensource is free and anyone can distribute it any 1 version is a commodity.

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

#183

Post by throw2016 »

This discussion is new because AWS and others are new and growing rapidly and it's a huge mistake to conflate it with conventional discussions and strategies about open source.

The threat is not just to open source but also entire categories of software and hardware.

The situation is so dire that you may create a product that does 10Gbs or something else and AWS offers 5Gbs but with automatic snapshots, high availability, scalability and distributed out of the box, and because of ease of use, access, near free management and scale users will still prefer AWS and your market will be limited to a extremely tiny subset requiring some specific niche and willing to configure, roll it out and maintain on their own.

This completely changes the incentives to create, because to compete you now need to create a 'cloud native' product that leverages AWS and other clouds. Which means a transformation of traditional open source and entire categories of software as we understand them to something new.

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

#184

Post by scarface74 »

houseofzeus wrote: post #159
ojosilva wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree, I think Docker is an example on how to almost completely fail to take advantage of being first to market. Redhat, AWS, Google and others were quicker to monetize on docker (the runtime) than Docker the company.

Docker are actually an example of a pattern, one that also impacts MongoDB and many other companies. That pattern is that they intentionally branded the product and the project with the same name (in this case Docker) to help with slipstreaming on the community mindshare they were building. The flip side of that which eventually comes home to roost though is that it means the two are easily confused . If I'm a custom…

I don't see anything Mongo could have done differently. Even if Mongo were completely proprietary software, it wouldn't have affected AWS. They didn't use Mongo's code just emulated their API. That's basically the same thing that kicked off the entire PC industry -- clean room cloning BIOS.

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

#185

Post by [deleted] »

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.

[deleted]

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

#186

Post by pjmlp »

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.

Oracle is in the Java world since the early days, they even collaborated with Sun on the whole Java workstation idea of the Network Computer. They used to have their own JVMs.

Also only IBM cared to make an alternative offer to acquire Sun, during the initial round.

The adware contracts were done by Sun, not Oracle.

Google has managed to create Android J++, and as Java developer that cares about the integrity of the Java platform I stand by Oracle.

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

#187

Post by ShardPhoenix »

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/

The first four words of the linked Gwern article are "Joel Spolsky in 2002". In fact he gives him credit 3 times!

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

#188

Post by shmerl »

> No, they are still not selling music; in fact, they are beating piracy at its own game: the music industry is selling convenience. Get nearly any piece of recorded music ever made, for a mere $10/month.

I find it more convenient, to have a DRM-free backup of the music I paid for. Sure, streaming is useful, but not when it's available in the form of rent only. That's why I'm using Bandcamp and not Spotify.

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

#189

Post by julienb_sea »

jhanschoo wrote: post #43
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…

The open source that you call "isn't free as in speech" is actually Free Software. You are able to develop with it in whatever way you want. The requirement is that whatever you develop is also Free Software and is distributed whenever it is used. This is what Stallman has in mind when he talks about free software. Your freedom to develop above free software developed by others cannot come at the cost of others' free…

This distinction seems highly misleading. Free is not free if it comes with a litany of restrictions. Licensing concerns pretty much blacklist a swath of open source software for actual use in a business context. Sure, many companies are willing to open source their developer friendly projects. Microsoft with VSCode is a great example. Same with Atlassian's contributions to complex open source UI components. Frankly, these are not done as revenue drivers, but instead as recruiting tools and ecosystem builders. Those benefits are ancillary to the core competency of the parent company.

It does not make sense for companies to open source all of their code. It's far too easy in today's world to stand up a highly reliable, performant and scalable SaaS application. Protecting the code behind a SaaS application allows companies to grow and protect themselves at an early stage. IMO this is a significant benefit to the open source community given the open source contributions that established SaaS companies tend to eventually move into.

"Free" software is not free at all if people are unable to use it in their systems for fear of legal repercussions.

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

#190

Post by shmerl »

KaoruAoiShiho wrote: post #122
CydeWeys wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is 5% supposed to be a lot? For that you get an entire game engine, which seems certain to save way more than 5% in total costs from not having to write one from scratch. Steam and the major app stores take 6X that much (30%) just for distribution! If Unreal is better than Unity, then it seems worth paying for.

5% is absolutely a fair price, even a great price. But it's a lot compared to free of course. For some games this is millions or hundreds of millions of dollars which is objectively a lot and hence *not worth it. Unreal is also not definitively better than Unity, which is really good. Anyway my post shouldn't be taken as a criticism of Unreal but rather telling Unity that they should be more like Unreal rather than t…

> For some games this is millions or hundreds of millions of dollars which is objectively a lot and hence not worth it. *

I guess only when developing their own engine is cheaper for them.

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