Where was the outrage when they implemented the MySQL and Postgres interfaces on Aurora?
They're basically killing a company behind an open-source project.
AWS gives open source the middle finger?
121–130 of 297 posts
Re: AWS gives open source the middle finger?
#122Earlier quoted context omitted.
The fact that some are okay with and would use an unreliable tool is not inconsistent with the fact that it is documented that the tool is unreliable. Popularity among users has little to do with the tool being reliable, and this particular one is already popular for being unreliable.
What you are saying doesn't really make any sense. A systemically unreliable database would never be popular as its not a piece of your architecture that you can tolerate having constant outages with. And there is no evidence of MongoDB being systemically unreliable.
> A systemically unreliable database would never be popular
1. Correctness and popularity are different
2. Not everyone looks for correctness, even when looking for a database. See: MySQL.
> as its not a piece of your architecture that you can tolerate having constant outages with
Reliability and correctness are not binary scales of 'works' vs. 'does not work'. Again, see MySQL.
> there is no evidence of MongoDB being systemically unreliable
There is plenty of evidence of MongoDB losing writes because of its (honestly) stupid design: writing to memory maps instead of files, never fsyncing, sharding and distributing without confirming disk flush.
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MySQL: For a long time, one needed to be aware of certain caveats and corners and limitations of MySQL or be surprised with data inconsistency and loss. That is not to say that MySQL could not be operated reliably; it could, just that the barrier was higher than it appeared.
From truncating data (with a warning) to not accepting and silently (i.e., without warnings) ignoring CHECK constraints, I've had clients who lost business data and realized it only too late to go back to the original data source.
I used to think MySQL was an bad database due to its concessions of correctness and poor documentation, until MongoDB came along with their lofty marketing and high-and-mighty "Nobody needs SQL anymore, we are Web-scale" blare-horn and failed to deliver on even keeping the data it claimed to have saved.
Re: AWS gives open source the middle finger?
#123A lot of people are focusing on the bitchiness, but to me this is actually interesting from the perspective of (F)OSS evolution.
This scenario is one of the many where (F)OSS explicitly protects downstream users: company reduces availability, user forks. It just so happens that the traditional players (the small, indie user va the big, bad corp) are actually mirrored (big, bad user vs small, indie corp). This has been the ugly reality of OSS for more than a decade now, and there seems to be no way to align the interests of “big users” more closely with upstream. Before the switch last year, MongoDB already used the most “aggressively collectivist” license available, and still it didn’t protect them from rich freeloaders.
This is also the other side of the coin in the Google vs Oracle debate about apis and copyright.
Re: AWS gives open source the middle finger?
#124A lot of people are focusing on the bitchiness, but to me this is actually interesting from the perspective of (F)OSS evolution. This scenario is one of the many where (F)OSS explicitly protects downstream users: company reduces availability, user forks. It just so happens that the traditional players (the small, indie user va the big, bad corp) are actually mirrored (big, bad user vs small, indie corp). This has bee…
> it didn’t protect them from rich freeloaders.
You offer a free software package to the world, so that anyone can use it as they see fit.
Some guy uses your software package.
How exactly has that guy became a freeloader in this story?
Re: AWS gives open source the middle finger?
#125I left AWS after six years of working there wholly because of their restrictive policies about developing software in your spare time -- especially if you were thinking about working on a game. I recognize this article is about a product offering of AWS, and not their internal policies towards contributing to open source, but the two are linked in my mind and I'm not all surprised to see a headline like this.
Every company has the same attitude in my experience, this ins't unique to Amazon. edit: For those down voting instead of just disagreeing provide a company and their policy. All the companies I've worked at have been the same as Amazon more or less and all my friends have similar employment clauses.
I refuse any contract where my employer claims ownership of code I wrote in my own time on my own machine that has nothing to do with the work I do for the company. Very few contracts have contained such a clause, and I believe at least one removed such a clause when I requested it.
These days I'm self-employed and renting myself out to large companies, and this has never been an issue. They only care about the work I do for them, not about what I do in private.
Re: AWS gives open source the middle finger?
#126Amazon was using MongoDB without paying for it. MongoDB found that objectionable, and changed the license such that Amazon would either have to pay, or stop using it. Amazon stopped using it, and started using its own in-house implementation instead (presumably because it was cheaper to develop it than to pay MongoDB). So, MongoDB got exactly what they asked for. It's just that, when they forced Amazon to make a choi…
Yeah, I don't understand it either. There is a company which puts 300 M$ effort into developing something and then another company is using the first company's brand recognition to get a competitive edge while offering zero added value (And no, hosting mongodb in AWS not a new thing, only uninformed people would assume so. When I look around I find services like Scalegrid or MDB Atlas itself which is exactly the thin…
Morally it might be questionable, if it puts MongoDB out of business and reinforces the AWS "monopoly".
However, MongoDB selected a free and open source license. This was always in the cards. They went with AGPL to keep the source maximally open for end users, but that never protected their revenue stream. (Some JS SDK companies used it for that purpose, where it makes some sene, but a DB is very different.)
But if they had started with something proprietary uptake would have been very likely much less. And people would have continued to use mysql or Cassandra if they really needed something "webscale".
Re: AWS gives open source the middle finger?
#127I don't even wonder. It's not just Open Source who will get nasty signs from amazon. They already have too much power for one company and the more power they'll have the less they have to abide by rules normal companies/humans have to abide by.
How are you breaking any rule if all you're doing is using a software package that's distributed with a FLOSS license?
Isn't that the whole point of releasing software under a FLOSS license?
Re: AWS gives open source the middle finger?
#128Amazon was using MongoDB without paying for it. MongoDB found that objectionable, and changed the license such that Amazon would either have to pay, or stop using it. Amazon stopped using it, and started using its own in-house implementation instead (presumably because it was cheaper to develop it than to pay MongoDB). So, MongoDB got exactly what they asked for. It's just that, when they forced Amazon to make a choi…
Any company bets on Amazon not being able to rewrite their software loses the bet. They even have their own CPUs because one of the CPU vendors failed to meet with their demands.
Re: AWS gives open source the middle finger?
#129I left AWS after six years of working there wholly because of their restrictive policies about developing software in your spare time -- especially if you were thinking about working on a game. I recognize this article is about a product offering of AWS, and not their internal policies towards contributing to open source, but the two are linked in my mind and I'm not all surprised to see a headline like this.
In the US, right? You can't do such a thing in the EU.
Re: AWS gives open source the middle finger?
#130Is there a license category that says something like: "Anyone can use our tech to build stuff with for free however you may not re-sell our tech wrapped in maintenance or hosting services"?
If you're a small open source company with a services business model, how do you stop someone like AWS forking your code, making a few changes they don't share with you and basically becoming the de-facto supplier of maintenance and services for your tech?