MariaDB CEO accuses large cloud vendors of strip-mining open source
1–9 of 9 posts
Re: MariaDB CEO accuses large cloud vendors of strip-mining open source
#2I know that there's a lot of open source fans in the developer community but I've honestly always seen it as some form of the tragedy of the commons. Intellectual property is pretty much the only way a small group of developers can differentiate themselves from a big player.
Nobody can compete with Amazon's discounts or their hardware, so if you redistribute IP for free from developers to large companies, how is this equitable, and what is so great about everyone becoming a consultant or customer support as a way to make money?
I have great sympathy for products like Datomic for this reason, because protecting your IP is in my opinion the only way to actually profit from your craft, which is writing software. The 'consumer first' culture of open source reminds me of the way musicians are being squeezed by internet platforms.
Re: MariaDB CEO accuses large cloud vendors of strip-mining open source
#3I know that there's a lot of open source fans in the developer community but I've honestly always seen it as some form of the tragedy of the commons. Intellectual property is pretty much the only way a small group of developers can differentiate themselves from a big player. Nobody can compete with Amazon's discounts or their hardware, so if you redistribute IP for free from developers to large companies, how is this…
AWS overcharges on their hardware to an absurd degree. The main problem is access to their network. You could host on your own hardware, but you'll never be able to offer the same QOS as a server directly inside an AWS datacenter - and thats where all your customers are.
Re: MariaDB CEO accuses large cloud vendors of strip-mining open source
#4I know that there's a lot of open source fans in the developer community but I've honestly always seen it as some form of the tragedy of the commons. Intellectual property is pretty much the only way a small group of developers can differentiate themselves from a big player. Nobody can compete with Amazon's discounts or their hardware, so if you redistribute IP for free from developers to large companies, how is this…
You're right - for most small teams. For companies with tons of money and resources, probably a bit less so, as the barrier to entry becomes bigger and bigger. That, and as Facebook proved time and again, they can afford to just copy you from scratch.
For SAAS products, what I typically try to do is open source the libraries, but not the product. So, for example, if I were to write something simple that checked a device, and sent an email, assuming neither library existed, I'd open source the device api library and the email library, but not the product that uses the two in conjunction. I think it's a good balance.
Re: MariaDB CEO accuses large cloud vendors of strip-mining open source
#5It seems like the most successful open source business models are 1) selling a service that uses open source, 2) selling a product that uses open source, or 3) being acquired by a profitable company.
Re: MariaDB CEO accuses large cloud vendors of strip-mining open source
#6If they are "abusing the license" as he claims, why are there no legal consequences?
Re: MariaDB CEO accuses large cloud vendors of strip-mining open source
#7If they are "abusing the license" as he claims, why are there no legal consequences?
The only instance in the article where I could find that any actual details about what the CEO meant was this:
> But, if AWS's going out of its way to make a rival service look inferior to its own, well, Howard's not happy about that.
So, AWS is not configuring mariadb optimally, or something. It has nothing to do with license violations. This article title is clickbait.
Re: MariaDB CEO accuses large cloud vendors of strip-mining open source
#8If amazon's own RDS is that bad, can a startup (or MariaDB itself) help?
Hopefully one can offer "optimized/certified" MariaDB instances -- by buying regular EC2 machines and then installing and managing the database on them.
The price of db.r5.xlarge is $0.48/hr vs regular r5.xlarge of $0.25/hour, so people are obviously willing to pay for the managed solution.
Re: MariaDB CEO accuses large cloud vendors of strip-mining open source
#9There are lots of ways to get to scale w/ an open source business model. One way is to have a great product and then get on HN by slamming the cloud vendors as strip miners :) There are a bunch of open source companies that have achieved some fairly incredible scale such as Confluent / Kafka or Hashicorp (u know the stuff Vagrant, Terraform and so on).