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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

#201

Post by samatman »

ojosilva wrote: post #192
scarface74 wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Emulating a propietary API would open up the door to litigation with uncertain outcome, generating distrust and bad press for Amazon. So not the same.

This has already been settled in the courts: APIs are not subject to copyright and may be freely reverse engineered, provided the usual cleanroom methods are followed.

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

#202

Post by gcb0 »

dstroot wrote: post #98
pjc50 wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

well, with openjdk nobody remembers oracle now. so I guess that changed.

if oracle wanted to continue to be the owners of Java they shouldn't have called their bluff and sued Google.

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

#203

Post by kelp »

blackoil wrote: post #114
BossingAround wrote: post #6

Earlier 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)

Bezos and AWS happened. As most of the new growth is coming from cloud particularly for newer stack of projects, the company will have to compete with big 3 providers, who have much better economy of scale, complementary revenue streams and miles deep pocket. If launched today, Redhat would have to compete wit Amazon for maintenance of RH linux vs AWS linux which is done for ~free.

Re AWS Linux support, ~free is about right. You do pay for it. At enterprise levels, you're paying a percent of your total bill for support. That can be significant.

https://aws.amazon.com/premiumsupport/pricing/

But with it you generally get very quick responses to issues, and if your bill is enough, you get a technical account manager who gets paged when you open a ticket. They handle many things, but I believe AWS Linux is in that list of many.

Having the Technical Account Manager is quite valuable.

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

#204

Post by cat199 »

cpitman wrote: post #71
cat199 wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

Red Hat does not have any "for-fee bolt-on addons", everything we ship is open source (or will be soon after acquisition of a closed-source company). Responding to some of the other comments, Red Hat revenue is nearly all from providing enterprise support for completely open source software. This is critically different from "services", ie consulting. These are yearly contracts that provide clients insurance if/when…

apologies -

I nearly added a parenthetical that these were typically open source under a different name if bolt-on (e.g. 389 vs directory, etc). will edit.

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

#205

Post by statictype »

ShardPhoenix wrote: post #187
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/

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

Yes but why not link to the original (which is also more readable)

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

#206

Post by scarface74 »

cstejerean wrote: post #130
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/

Well this is like an inverse for that strategy. If your core product is OSS you aren’t commoditizing its complements, but rather trying to build and charge for those complements (such as hosting or management services, consulting, etc) because you can’t charge for the product itself.

For a profit seeking corporation, your core product is the product that makes you money.

Roku sells hardware, but the CEO has said in no uncertain terms that their core product is aggregating user data to sell to advertisers. That they don’t consider themselves a hardware company.

IBM was also big into open source to sell mainframes and services.

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

#207

Post by mr_toad »

scarface74 wrote: post #78
jimmychangas wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> there's no intrinsic reason that the same company that gives away labour as OSS should also make the best complements to that OSS There are no guarantees that they will provide the best complements to their own product, but the common sense is that they will. From a marketing perspective, I think it makes complete sense, especially when selling to enterprise customers.

But they don’t. The best complement for server side software is often being able to do it reliably, globally, redundantly, managed, on demand, and cheaply. The only three companies that can do that reliably as far as most customers are concerned are Amazon, Microsoft, and Google.

> as far as most customers are concerned

Probably true for the average punter, but we shouldn’t overlook the other players, like Alibaba, DigitalOcean, IBM, Vultr, Oracle, Linode and more.

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

#208

Post by scarface74 »

mr_toad wrote: post #207
scarface74 wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But they don’t. The best complement for server side software is often being able to do it reliably, globally, redundantly, managed, on demand, and cheaply. The only three companies that can do that reliably as far as most customers are concerned are Amazon, Microsoft, and Google.

> as far as most customers are concerned Probably true for the average punter, but we shouldn’t overlook the other players, like Alibaba, DigitalOcean, IBM, Vultr, Oracle, Linode and more.

A serious enterprise is not going to bet their cloud infrastructure on Linode. AWS offers a lot more than just a bunch of hosted VMs.

A serious CTO whose neck is on the line is not going to go with a small player.

To paraphrase an old saying.

“No one ever got fired for buying AWS”

For an MS shop, the same could be said for Azure.

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

#209

Post by mnutt »

talkingtab wrote: post #169
cmsj wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 peo…

Not to detract at all from your point, but Mongo (10gen) was very, very well-funded out of the gate, and the original idea was a platform-as-a-service built on open source apps before they pivoted to the open source database idea.

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

#210

Post by hdra »

shmerl wrote: post #190
KaoruAoiShiho wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Developing their own engine isn't the only other option, Unity's model where you pay a flat-fee for the engine regardless of your sales is another, and if the game is selling really well, that is a much cheaper option.
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