AWS gives open source the middle finger?

Amazon was using MongoDB without paying for it.<p>MongoDB found that objectionable, and changed the license such that Amazon would either have to pay, or stop using it.<p>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).<p>So, MongoDB got exactly what they asked for. It&#x27;s just that, when they forced Amazon to make a choice, they didn&#x27;t expect one of the options they gave them to be viable. They were wrong.<p>I don&#x27;t see how Amazon is in the wrong here. They are no longer using MongoDB for free, as the authors demanded. They did not reuse any code. They are not advertising their replacement as MongoDB, either.<p>Is it because of API compatibility? But the notion that one cannot reimplement a public API for the sake of compatibility is in and of itself extremely hostile to the F&#x2F;OSS ecosystem, given how many products in it are reimplementations of proprietary APIs.

&gt;<i>However, developers are technically savvy enough to distinguish between the real thing and a poor imitation. MongoDB will continue to outperform any impersonations in the market</i><p>This feels like a MongoDB sponsored post. How badly would you have to fuck up to be considered a poor imitation of MongoDB?<p>In any case I don&#x27;t see how having their own hosted version of MongoDB is a middle finger to open source, but Aurora SQL&#x2F;PostgresQL isn&#x27;t. Is Cockroach a middle finger Postgres? I don&#x27;t consider this any more a middle finger than the SSPL.

I 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.<p>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&#x27;m not all surprised to see a headline like this.

From the movie &quot;Revolution OS&quot; [1], Richard Stallman explaining Copyleft:<p><i>&quot;If we put the software in the public domain, somebody else would be able to make a little bit of changes and turn that into a proprietary software package, which means that the users would be running our software, but they wouldn&#x27;t have freedom to cooperate and share.&quot;</i><p><i>&quot;And what we do is, we say, this software is copyrighted and we, the authors give you permission to redistribute copies, we give you permission to change, we give you permission to add to it. But when you redistribute it, it has to be under these terms, no more and no less. So that whoever gets it from you also gets the freedom to cooperate with other people, if he wants to. And then, in this way everywhere the software goes, the freedom goes, too. And it becomes an inalienable right to cooperate with other people and form a community.&quot;</i><p>Bruce Perens, on the choice of the GPL for Debian:<p><i>&quot;Uh, it&#x27;s one of the few software licenses that was written from the standpoint of the community rather than from the standpoint of um, protecting a company or um, as is the case with MIT and BSD license, performing the goals of a government grant program. Uh, and the GPL is really unique in that. It&#x27;s not just a license. It&#x27;s a whole philosophy that, I think, motivated the open source definition.&quot;</i><p>MongoDB tried to protect its company&#x27;s profits, and as a result, Amazon [and its users] now have a proprietary product rather than an open source one. Could have gotten free fixes from the biggest lab in the world, but instead they&#x27;re getting jack squat. And since Amazon&#x27;s product is proprietary, now users and the community have less freedom.<p>Linus is asked at the end if he&#x27;s bothered that he&#x27;s not cashing out on billions of dollars of use, and he basically doesn&#x27;t care. He just wanted people to work on the software. If Linux had the same licensing scheme, it may have remained a hobby operating system.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=Eluzi70O-P4#t=17m" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=Eluzi70O-P4#t=17m</a>

&quot;AWS gives MongoDB the middle finger&quot; would be a more accurate, less sensationalist headline.<p>Making a business choice to not buy licenses from a single for-profit company doesn&#x27;t really have anything to do with open source in general.

WTF with this title. We all agree API shouldn&#x27;t be licenseable, but now we expect companies to feel like they shouldn&#x27;t use API for free because without licensing the source code &quot;it looks bad&quot;?

&gt; “However, developers are technically savvy enough to distinguish between the real thing and a poor imitation. MongoDB will continue to outperform any impersonations in the market.”<p>That&#x27;s a bold statement to make against AWS services.

A lot of people are focusing on the bitchiness, but to me this is actually interesting from the perspective of (F)OSS evolution.<p>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.<p>This is also the other side of the coin in the Google vs Oracle debate about apis and copyright.

mongodb announced the Server Side Public License change less than 12 weeks ago. When you account for end of year and holidays, building a new product line and rolling it out in such a short period of time seems unlikely. I would guess this has been in the works for a while (although admittedly I could be overestimating engineering effort and underestimating amazon engineering talent).

&quot;When the terms you offer are accepted, hold to them. Else no one will trust you.&quot;<p>For someone to release a major software package under an open source license with particular terms, and then to get angry when other people enjoy that software under the terms that YOU specified, is just nonsense. You aren&#x27;t happy with the way things played out, because you didn&#x27;t really understand the types of activities that were possible or maybe just didn&#x27;t think about it.<p>Look, it&#x27;s their software and they can re-license it as they see fit. But to vilify AWS for using their open source software legitimately under the terms they licensed it under is offensive. <i>That</i> is giving the middle finger to open source.<p>How exactly the author of this article can write something that finds fault in the company using software legitimately under an open source license, and not with the company who is re-licensing their software to a non-OSI license? Who is truly giving the middle finger to open source?

The most important issue to me is that Amazon benefits from open source not only without supporting it, but by threatening it. While we can argue whether it is MongoDb or not and other issues, it is clear that Amazon benefits. Otherwise why not simply invent their own API? They have the benefit of a well thought out system, of a large pool of people who know and can use MongoDB. Can they afford to support MongoDB? If not perhaps they should just &#x27;fess up.<p>The open source system is great. Many individuals create the content and share it. There has been a great tolerance for companies like Amazon that exploit - not use but exploit - this community. While I don&#x27;t have enough experience to know if MongoDB&#x27;s response was a good one, I do think it is time for the community at large to begin a continuing discussion of what to do when large companies like Amazon are bad citizens.<p>Open source thrives on being ... well open, and it is important to retain that openness <i>within</i> the community.

Bezos gives <i>everyone</i> the middle finger. Doesn&#x27;t matter if you&#x27;re part of the massive open source stack they profit from or one of their workers unfairly paid trying to meet unfair workload demands or one of the 100s of countries, states and cities they relentlessly conspire to steal taxes from.<p>What&#x27;s really funny about their not-mongodb as a service is they will inevitably roll over any piece of software <i>third parties</i> host on AWS too if they think it makes enough money. Your SaaS is just another project for some team waiting on their next. They have already done that for 10,000s of physical products on Amazon.com that were sold by third party vendors who became redundant via Amazon releasing similar products under their own brands.

It&#x27;s mongodb though... It&#x27;s well documented at this point you shouldn&#x27;t be using mongo on anything that matters

&gt; &quot;To be fair, AWS has become more active in open source lately&quot;<p>What are they referring to?<p>From my perspective, Amazon rarely open sources their work. It&#x27;s one of the reasons I would never want to work at Amazon. It&#x27;s very clear they have no love for technology outside of making a business out of it.

More like Mongo gave AWS the finger, then AWS said fine and started using Postgres. Now Mongo is upset that they have an inferior product that is losing market share because they killed of their potentially laregest cloud deployment.

The headline is as misleading and wrong as it could be.<p>AWS is not giving open source the middle finger. It is giving the middle finger to a project that was once open source and has decided to be no longer open source.

We are in the middle of a transformation and its clear open source will have to change. There is little stopping cloud providers and other well funded parties monetizing your projects leaving little room for you to.<p>Because they don&#x27;t have to focus on development they can divert their resources to marketing, adding the syrup on top to &#x27;ease use&#x27; and ride the hype wave while the original developers are dismissed as &#x27;technical&#x27; folks who do not understand marketing when the fact is they do not have time left over from development, or the resources.<p>It&#x27;s perfectly legitimate to expect to sustain yourself while building open source products and projects. Unfortunately we are flooded with one sided superficial perspectives and short term narratives that look at open source projects as if its a crime to expect to make some money while not even examining slightly the parasitic models of cloud providers and others who in effect hijack open source projects with marketing.<p>The end game is few can compete with the resources, reach and engineering of behemoths like AWS, Azure, GCP and others. And at the customer end the cloud is unavoidable and thus will only see increased adoption. This is not only going to affect open source but dismantle entire groups of software and hardware ecosystems.<p>The only way forward seems open source projects that leverage these cloud platforms to provide some additional functionality, but these projects will be intimately tied to these platforms and not &#x27;open&#x27; as we understand the term.

&gt; However, developers are technically savvy enough to distinguish between the real thing and a poor imitation. MongoDB will continue to outperform any impersonations in the market.<p><i>snerk</i> Well, if it doesn&#x27;t lose your data or have broken replication protocols for years, then it&#x27;d be a poor imitation, so I&#x27;ll give the CEO that one.

Where was the outrage when they implemented the MySQL and Postgres interfaces on Aurora?

Seems to me that Mongo gave AWS the middle finger two years ago.

Flamebait. Replace “open source” with “MongoDB” (the company, not the code) then the title makes much more sense, and the article is kind of a nothingburger.

Stupid title for the article. Inflammatory and I bet tc got some eyeballs.

A major part of the success of open source has been the fact that companies have the option to fork&#x2F;tweak&#x2F;sell the code. MongoDB has benefited from this as much as anyone. They gained the adoption levels they have now by advertising these exact benefits. Only later did they decide you need a commercial license to provide it as a service. How many companies would have thought twice about using MongoDB had they thought they would eventually have to pay for it and&#x2F;or couldn&#x27;t monetize it themselves?<p>Also, it&#x27;s not like Amazon is not giving back to the open source community (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;aws.amazon.com&#x2F;opensource&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;aws.amazon.com&#x2F;opensource&#x2F;</a>)

That&#x27;s a very tendentious title.

Is there a license category that says something like: &quot;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&quot;?<p>If you&#x27;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&#x27;t share with you and basically becoming the de-facto supplier of maintenance and services for your tech?

Implementing MongoDB API is something like implementing SQL language, doesn&#x27;t it? Plus communication protocol with auth, of course.

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

Scaling mongodb is not easy, and may this is why AWS DocumentDB is built instead of providing an RDS version of mongodb?

I don&#x27;t even wonder.<p>It&#x27;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&#x27;ll have the less they have to abide by rules normal companies&#x2F;humans have to abide by.

RIP MongoDB

not sure this is worth the controversial title. good on amazon.

Yeah, overall this seems like a bad move by Amazon on multiple fronts. The name of the new service is DocumentDB, which by itself is a name they have recycled from competitors...

Very well put. I already found disgusting what AWS did with Dynamodb (adding key-eviction, etc as a catch-up with MDB) but this is even more hideous.