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

251–257 of 257 posts

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

#251

Post by scarface74 »

pas wrote: post #250
scarface74 wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So you’re going to “move to the cloud” and just host a bunch of VMs. Congratulations, you now have the worse of all worlds. You’re spending more than baremetal, you’re spending just as much on maintenance and management instead of letting someone else do the “undifferentiated heavy lifting” and your developers are moving slower than they would have if they took advantage of your cloud vendors offerings. Win????

You can't just "move to the cloud" by firing Ops people and giving an AWS account to your Devs. Or, well, you can, but then don't forget to set your billing limit to infinity as well. Because AWS wants to make money. Anyway, I'm not saying RDS/Aurora/etc. is bad, but eventually the heavy lifting will be available for anyone ( https://github.com/beekhof/rss-operator and similar projects ), and it's not like AWS likes…

There is more to the cloud than “managed Kubernetes”.

While you can’t fire all of your ops you can reduce the headcount by a combination of managed services/servers, automation, outsourcing to managed service providers, and an auto healing fault tolerant infrastructure

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

#252

Post by sebringj »

merlynn wrote: post #196
sebringj wrote: post #147

So its like Mongo is being eaten by AWS in terms of its service offerings after it gains mindshare as DocumentDB is essentially a swap-out replacement for larger companies. That somehow smells to me as it erodes funding from its foundation in some way. I don't know.

Michael here from MongoDB - We're currently still running tests on users ability to change from MongoDB to DocumentDB. It may not be quite as simple as exporting and reimporting the data. Many features present in MongoDB 3.6 do not work in DocumentDB ( https://docs.aws.amazon.com/documentdb/latest/developerguide... ). Preliminary test results show that DocumenDB is closer to MongoDB 2.0 in its features (with some exc…

That is definitely not good for my needs. I'll be sticking to Atlas over DocumentDB or simply plain Mongo latest. Thank you for the comment.

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

#253

Post by JoshTriplett »

nickpsecurity wrote: post #248
JoshTriplett wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fascinating to refer to "loophole-filled licenses", while referencing a license with no legal history of enforcement. Meanwhile, the GPL does have a long history of legal enforcement, and has successfully gotten code released on numerous occasions. What rulings are you referring to that "worked against freedom"? Apart from that, this is nothing that hasn't been seen in every past "it's hard to make money on Open Sour…

"Fascinating to refer to "loophole-filled licenses", while referencing a license with no legal history of enforcement. " They might come up with something. License Zero author has done a remarkable job of focusing on root causes and simplicity to prevent that. When he worries about commercial use, he says commercial use triggers the requirement. When he wants changes released, his license says any change has to be re…

> [F]OSS sends most of the money to the opposition

That's where we fundamentally disagree. People who are building and contributing to FOSS are not "the opposition" just because they're large companies; on the contrary, it's a huge success story of FOSS that it's powering billion-dollar industries, both by supplanting proprietary software and by enabling use cases that don't even exist in proprietary software. The size of the whole pool is growing.

> I said you can loose money if they patent sue you or pull some stuff about API.

There are multiple licenses that address that, such as by including an explicit patent grant; that prevents the "submit code and then sue people who use it" problem. And there's absolutely nothing you can do to prevent patent lawsuits from people who aren't subject to the license, short of reforming the patent system (which, please, by all means do if you can).

And regarding API, similarly, some licenses include provisions that would prevent someone from suing over code they submitted, and beyond that you can't protect against people outside your ecosystem suing you or others inside your ecosystem.

> not funding work in Congress and courts to protect our freedoms.

There's a substantial and constant conversation going on regarding how to better improve laws to support FOSS.

> I call mine shared source or source available per your prior advice on that. (Thanks again btw.)

Thank you, I really appreciate that.

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

#254

Post by marcinzm »

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?

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

MongoDB does not specify, to quote their FAQ on the new license:

>As a result, we have observed organizations, especially the international cloud vendors, begin to test the boundaries of the AGPL license.

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

#255

Post by merlynn »

scarface74 wrote: post #197
merlynn wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

MongoDB certainly can compete at scale with AWS with MongoDB Atlas - Managed Database as a Service.

By hosting on AWS, Azure, and GCP... And even then they don’t host your database in your own VPC which is a big deal to some companies.

But with Atlas, you can VPC peer if you need that level of security and performance between your app and database. https://docs.atlas.mongodb.com/security-vpc-peering/

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

#256

Post by scarface74 »

merlynn wrote: post #255
scarface74 wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By hosting on AWS, Azure, and GCP... And even then they don’t host your database in your own VPC which is a big deal to some companies.

But with Atlas, you can VPC peer if you need that level of security and performance between your app and database. https://docs.atlas.mongodb.com/security-vpc-peering/

I agree with you. But, some security folks still don’t think that’s good enough. These are usually old school on prem security guys who don’t really get cloud.

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

#257

Post by LudoA »

tanilama wrote: post #59
KaoruAoiShiho wrote: post #5

Agreed, the dream of a megacap open source company is dead. Mongodb shows this, the Unity fiasco (I'm surprised nobody has put the two together) shows this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18874400 Guys, charge for your work. Don't place the economic value of your company to be ancillary to your product. That just invites another company that has that ancillary as their core competency to come and do it much bet…

> megacap open source company Isn't this by itself an oxymoron? Open source isn't shouldn't be one's marketing stunt to gain attention, if you want to charge your software make it proprietary and charge people for license. Using open source as a last resort bait isn't cool. My only jab at Amazon is that they should give back their code to the community or they need to be forced to do so, not that they can't make mone…

Don't think it has to be an oxymoron. Look at Red Hat: fully 100% open source code, but a multi-billion $ revenue.
Post reply on HN