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

AWS gives open source the middle finger?

techcrunch.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

231–240 of 297 posts

Re: AWS gives open source the middle finger?

#231

Post by helen___keller »

toyg wrote: post #214
rjf72 wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not at all hard to have a license where something is free for noncommercial or limited commercial usage, and premium otherwise. This is an extremely typical model for many products today whose licenses you could use as inspiration. See for instance things like Microsoft's Visual Studio. And the nice thing is that contract law is really quite powerful and very much on your side when it comes to enforcement. You d…

It's not unreasonable to wish for a middle ground where small actors don't have to pay and big actors do. > a license where something is free for noncommercial or limited commercial usage, and premium otherwise. That's basically what Mongo have switched to. Unfortunately, this broke other bits of community, because playing with licenses is actually not that easy. My point is that, maybe, we need a new license that ca…

Just to be clear, the FSF does not agree with your distinction. The FSF only endorses free software, which means free for all users, commercial or noncommercial ( https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/categories.en.html ):

>Proprietary software is another name for nonfree software. In the past we subdivided nonfree software into “semifree software”, which could be modified and redistributed noncommercially, and “proprietary software”, which could not be. But we have dropped that distinction and now use “proprietary software” as synonymous with nonfree software.

>The Free Software Foundation follows the rule that we cannot install any proprietary program on our computers except temporarily for the specific purpose of writing a free replacement for that very program. Aside from that, we feel there is no possible excuse for installing a proprietary program.

Re: AWS gives open source the middle finger?

#232

Post by skywhopper »

rmc wrote: post #185
askmike wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They are not advertising their replacement as MongoDB, either. I don't really agree there. The service is called documentDB and this is how they describe it [1]: > Amazon DocumentDB (with MongoDB compatibility) > Fast, scalable, highly available MongoDB-compatible database And the first 2 sentences: > Amazon DocumentDB (with MongoDB compatibility) is a fast, scalable, highly available, and fully managed document da…

> You have to read all of that pretty carefully to understand that it's NOT MongoDB I disagree. If I see "Blah-compatible" I know it's not blah.

Yeah, this is pretty clear. I do assume it will act the same as MongoDB 3.6, since that's what they claim, but it's extremely clear it's _not_ MongoDB.

Re: AWS gives open source the middle finger?

#234

Post by hartator »

yowlingcat wrote: post #201
fogetti wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I think I almost completely disagree with you. The product of MongoDB itself offered less than zero added value when it first launched through a lack of data integrity. The $300MM put into it was put into marketing. Mongo tried to squeeze Amazon and users, which is actually great. They are trying to walk the walk now, and what they're going to realize is that they can't. Amazon will out-execute them and hopefully put…

> because I have nothing but disdain and scorn for MongoDB

That’s bit harsh. MongoDB has its uses. Denormalized data struture make it very easy to scale for example. Being able to use JS everywhere is nice too.

Re: AWS gives open source the middle finger?

#235

Post by toyg »

helen___keller wrote: post #231
toyg wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not unreasonable to wish for a middle ground where small actors don't have to pay and big actors do. > a license where something is free for noncommercial or limited commercial usage, and premium otherwise. That's basically what Mongo have switched to. Unfortunately, this broke other bits of community, because playing with licenses is actually not that easy. My point is that, maybe, we need a new license that ca…

Just to be clear, the FSF does not agree with your distinction. The FSF only endorses free software, which means free for all users, commercial or noncommercial ( https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/categories.en.html ): >Proprietary software is another name for nonfree software. In the past we subdivided nonfree software into “semifree software”, which could be modified and redistributed noncommercially, and “proprietary…

The FSF doesn't have a monopoly on the sentiment of open-source communities. Their principles were developed in a very different scenario, which is the point of my comment.

Re: AWS gives open source the middle finger?

#236

Post by pragmacoders »

weego wrote: post #131
fogetti wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

This is literally the future open source promised and people wanted: the freedom for a business to be flexible in regards to technology and not get tied into unpleasant vendor contracts and demands. There's no point in, or place for, spirit of the system vs letter of the system discussions or calls to morality. Mongo does not deserve to survive / exist if it can't make it's offering better than a competitors. Would M…

Yep - open source software was built for you and your startup to not pay people for labor.

You got it. You've gotten right to the heart of the matter and have it all figured out.

Re: AWS gives open source the middle finger?

#237

Post by BeetleB »

warpech wrote: post #216
geezerjay wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

Freeloader on open source software is someone who runs profit by selling it to a major market without contributing back to the project. Why? Because the freeloader increases the demand side for the software (more users translate to more feature requests, more bug reports), without increasing the supply side (resources for people who work it). This puts pressure onto the project that is hard to sustain in the long ter…

>Freeloader on open source software is someone who runs profit by selling it to a major market without contributing back to the project.

Something the GPL allows: It's poor form to use derogatory terms when open source explicitly says "This is OK".

Re: AWS gives open source the middle finger?

#238

Post by BeetleB »

mcv wrote: post #137
geezerjay wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

Because they have money and don't use it to support the community. Nobody is saying it explicitly, but of course we want small indie people to be able to use stuff for free while rich corporations foot the bill. But it's hard to codify that in a way that doesn't explicitly so, and it's hard to enforce a rule where something is free only if you're small or poor, but it costs money if you're big and rich. And to see th…

>Nobody is saying it explicitly, but of course we want small indie people to be able to use stuff for free while rich corporations foot the bill.

Who is "we" here?

Certainly not the FSF.

Why does OSI approve licenses that clearly don't care about this (e.g. GPL)?

Re: AWS gives open source the middle finger?

#239

Post by kemitchell »

int_19h wrote: post #29

Amazon 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…

An AWS team member mentioned to me on Twitter that the DocumentDB project at Amazon began more than two years ago. Mongo may or may not have known about it directly, but even if they didn’t, they had to expect it.

The difference between AGPLv3 and the new SSPL applies to all work Mongo releasaes going forward. As intended, that difference will make it difficult for AWS to maintain compatibility, which the article points out is limited from the get-go.

Re: AWS gives open source the middle finger?

#240

Post by detaro »

Sir_Cmpwn wrote: post #233

>a hosted drop-in replacement for MongoDB that doesn’t use any MongoDB code Is there any evidence for this? I assumed they forked the last Apache 2.0 version of Mongo.

Mongo was AGPL, not Apache 2. It seems unlikely Amazon was willing to integrate an AGPL code into AWS.
Post reply on HN