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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

#211

Post by shmerl »

hdra wrote: post #210
shmerl wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Not if Unity doesn't perform well enough for their needs I suppose.

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

#212

Post by evanweaver »

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 started as a closed source, venture-backed startup and was purchased and released to the community by a foundation set up by one of the founders when the startup failed. So it too was subsidized by corporate interests that ultimately saw no return on their investment.

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

#213

Post by mooreds »

geggam wrote: post #156
mooreds wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> When purchasing RI I saw 800K a month. I don't understand. Can you please clarify?

When buying reserved instances ( 3 year reserved ) the normal 400k spend was doubled to 800 thousand that month

Ah, thanks. What was the monthly spend after the RI purchase?

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

#214

Post by bb88 »

nickpsecurity wrote: post #127
JoshTriplett wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those aren't Open Source licenses, so that's the same as the suggestion in the parent comment to make the software proprietary and charge for licenses.

Parity is an open source license that should achieve the goal of contribution sharing better than the others since it's wording focuses on changes, not distribution models. https://licensezero.com/licenses/parity It also has a patent license, unlike many permissive ones. They shouldnt even qualify as open source if you can get sued under patent law for using that software. Need some patent protection in license.

https://opensource.org/faq

Can I call my program "Open Source" even if I don't use an approved license?

Please don't do that. If you call it "Open Source" without using an approved license, you will confuse people. This is not merely a theoretical concern — we have seen this confusion happen in the past, and it's part of the reason we have a formal license approval process. See also our page on license proliferation for why this is a problem.

Is an Open Source license, even if it is not listed on your web site?

In general, no. We run all licenses through an approval process to provide an accepted standard on which licenses are Open Source, and we list the approved ones. Be dubious of claimed Open Source-ness for licenses that haven't gone through the process. See also the license proliferation page for why this matters so much.

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

#215

Post by needusername »

lwf wrote: post #137
nacs wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You're thinking of GNU Classpath, maybe? OpenJDK is (a subset of) the Oracle JDK. > OpenJDK is the official reference implementation of Java SE since version 7. and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenJDK#Release_of_the_class_l...

> OpenJDK is (a subset of) the Oracle JDK.

Not anymore. With Java 11 it is entirely the same code, at least until somebody takes over maintenance of the Java 11 branch from Oracle in two months.

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

#216

Post by zby »

manigandham wrote: post #180
zby wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would AWS be a customer if Mongo was entirely proprietary and not when it is mostly Open Source?

Because open-source is free, that's the big difference. Why would they pay for something they don't have to? There's barely anything in the enterprise edition that's worth paying for, especially when most of it is operations tools that AWS doesn't need.

If it was proprietary it would not be free - why should they pay then and not now? I am arguing that they would not, just like they don't now - there is no difference. The problem is with selling software - not with Open Source, if it was entirely Open Source - then they would not have to pay and they would use it.

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

#217

Post by mrep »

cmsj wrote: post #161
infinite8s wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Google built and open sourced an entire horizontal scaling cluster management system for MySQL: https://vitess.io/

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

#218

Post by pjmlp »

gcb0 wrote: post #202
dstroot wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

OpenJDK is mostly developed by Oracle employees. There isn't OpenJDK without them.

Oracle did the right thing against Android J++.

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

#219

Post by manigandham »

zby wrote: post #216
manigandham wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because open-source is free, that's the big difference. Why would they pay for something they don't have to? There's barely anything in the enterprise edition that's worth paying for, especially when most of it is operations tools that AWS doesn't need.

If it was proprietary it would not be free - why should they pay then and not now? I am arguing that they would not, just like they don't now - there is no difference. The problem is with selling software - not with Open Source, if it was entirely Open Source - then they would not have to pay and they would use it.

What? If it's proprietary or closed source then the clouds have pay for to legally offer it to their customers. They can't just steal it without paying.

This is extremely common. How do you think Windows, SQL Server, Oracle, Redhat Linux, Spark Enterprise, Cloudera/Hortonworks, and lots of other products are offered by the clouds?

If there's enough demand for proprietary software then the clouds will do a licensing deal directly with the vendor, however MongoDB gave away too much of the product as open-source so there's no reason to pay them. That's the problem. The other issue is that if it was never open-source then nobody might even be using it in the first place, so it's a hard balance.

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

#220

Post by dragos1984 »

samatman wrote: post #201
ojosilva wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

After the Google vs Oracle case i thought the courts decided the opposite of what you are saying: APIs are copyrightable and Google will have to pay aot of money for using them in Android.
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