Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

AWS, MongoDB, and the Economic Realities of Open Source

stratechery.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

231–240 of 257 posts

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

#231

Post by GenghisSean »

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…

I am happy to see someone mention freedom in this thread. I believe the term "open source" distracts from the more prescient issue of user freedom.

One of the issues with SSPL is that it intertwines the ideas of an AGPL style copyleft with an allowance for SaaS use cases, specifically in section 13 of SSPL. I would argue this is more pernicious than an openly proprietary license for precisely the wolf in sheep's clothing reasoning you mentioned. People adopting MongoDB and its endorsement of SaaS may believe they're supporting the values of "open source", but they're sacrificing user freedom as Stallman points out in this blog post.

https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/who-does-that-server-really-s...

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

#232

Post by pas »

scarface74 wrote: post #208
mr_toad wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

more than VMs. yes, and that's the vendor lock in part.

sometimes it's okay though.

but AWS monoculture is not a bright future.

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

#233

Post by CydeWeys »

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.

It doesn't appear that there are any AAA titles made using the Unity engine though. It may simply not be good enough. The Unreal engine, by contrast, has many AAA titles built on it, including quite possibly the biggest game of all time, Fortnite.

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

#235

Post by scarface74 »

pas wrote: post #232
scarface74 wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

more than VMs. yes, and that's the vendor lock in part. sometimes it's okay though. but AWS monoculture is not a bright future.

All of the services with no lock in

Elastic Cache - hosted Redis and Memcached

Aurora - compatible with MySQL and Postgres

RDS - hosted versions of Mysql, MariaDB, Sql Server, and Oracle.

Redshift - yes it uses a proprietary/columnar store engine but it is compatible with Postgres.

Etc.

But the bigger point is that you’re always locked into your infrastructure, do you think your CTO is going to move from their million dollar Oracle infrastructure because you used the Repository Pattern?

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

#236

Post by mr_toad »

scarface74 wrote: post #208
mr_toad wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

If you go with AWS because they have the best SLA, or GCE because they have better managed K8 offerings, then fine.

But going with AWS because ‘no-one ever got fired’ for it, or picking Azure because you play squash with a guy from Microsoft’s sales team is just lazy. Not that I’m saying it doesn’t happen.

Forbes and Gartner might ignore the other players, doesn’t mean we can’t be better informed.

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

#237

Post by nickpsecurity »

JoshTriplett wrote: post #133
nickpsecurity wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> Parity is an open source license No, it isn't: https://opensource.org/licenses/alphabetical A few issues: > 3. Contribute software you develop, deploy, monitor, or run with this software. That goes farther than the OSI, FSF, or DFSG allows, extending into software that is not in any way derived from the licensed software. It's also not obvious from the license that it allows private modifications that aren't distri…

Ok. So, you're using the technical definition of open source from that organization instead of the popular one I was using. That's fine. The goal of copyleft is supposed to get modifications shared. Parity does it better than any popular license. They all screwed up allowing people to dodge their goal. So, I'd say Parity is better at making open and free software than all of those. They need to update their requirements to match reality or just get results they say they're after.

That's less important than another realization I've had since we last talked about licenses. I've determined that most OSS/FOSS licenses actually oppose freedom in practice. You get less software freedom and high-quality software with source over time following those models due to their built-in weaknesses. I wrote specifics in one comment and a follow-up replying to Cantrill's recent analysis:

https://lobste.rs/s/0h98nl/it_s_not_okay_pretend_your_softwa...

https://lobste.rs/s/kbcjnx/open_source_confronts_its_midlife...

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

#238

Post by dspillett »

GenghisSean wrote: post #230
marcinzm wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

MongoDB did use the AGPL and still had issues with companies trying to argue they didn't need to release their changes. So they switched to their own license which was even more explicit on the matter.

What problems did MongoDB run into? Can you link to any specific instances?

I think it was specifically Amazon not releasing their changes.

Maybe AGPL would cover them and force the release, but if Amazon stuck their heals down it would be an expensive legal fight. My guess is that it was just easier to change the licence used going forward to one that is more explicit and unambiguous about the matter.

It was my understanding that AGPL was supposed to cover this specific type of use, so would also be interested in know if there is a real problem or if the licence change was simply to make the point without needing to go lawyer-to-lawyer with someone in possession of Amazon's resources.

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

#239

Post by detaro »

dspillett wrote: post #238
GenghisSean wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What problems did MongoDB run into? Can you link to any specific instances?

I think it was specifically Amazon not releasing their changes. Maybe AGPL would cover them and force the release, but if Amazon stuck their heals down it would be an expensive legal fight. My guess is that it was just easier to change the licence used going forward to one that is more explicit and unambiguous about the matter. It was my understanding that AGPL was supposed to cover this specific type of use, so woul…

I'd actually be kind of surprised if Amazon did actually use it - most of the big tech companies are allergic to AGPL, and e.g. Google does not allow it to be used at all, even internally.

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

#240

Post by scarface74 »

mr_toad wrote: post #236
scarface74 wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If you go with AWS because they have the best SLA, or GCE because they have better managed K8 offerings, then fine. But going with AWS because ‘no-one ever got fired’ for it, or picking Azure because you play squash with a guy from Microsoft’s sales team is just lazy. Not that I’m saying it doesn’t happen. Forbes and Gartner might ignore the other players, doesn’t mean we can’t be better informed.

Well, let’s look at where the phrase originated and how that turned out.

If someone had bought a mainframe IBM system in 1980 to run their COBOL system over their competitor, 40 years later, they could still buy a compatible system from IBM. It’s competitors - not so much.

On the other hand, idealism has its place, but when things hit the fan because of your choice of vendors, it’s a lot easier to justify a buying decision by saying the vendor was in the second quadrant of Gartner’s Magic Square.

Post reply on HN