Two comments:<p>Firstly, the discussion at the front about the music industry is quite insightful, but I'd go further - they didn't want to sell convenience at first. Used to the physical embodiment of recordings rather than the de-materialized reality of digital music, they spent years working on <i>mandated inconvenience</i> through DRM and other legal actions. Always remember that if the music industry had won unopposed you'd have to pay a license fee to set a MP3 as your ringtone, as well as having to license every copy on every device separately.<p>Secondly, about mongodb: I'm reminded of <a href="https://www.gwern.net/Complement" rel="nofollow">https://www.gwern.net/Complement</a> "Commoditize Your Complement", but in reverse.<p>Open source software is by definition commoditized. Everyone can have a copy at no cost. So what is an "open source VC funded" company doing? Creating complements and selling those. It's just that there's no intrinsic reason that the same company that gives away labour as OSS should also make the best complements to that OSS. It's not a law of nature that e.g. Redhat should be the best people to provide consultancy on RHEL.<p>The music industry did not expect their product to become free to distribute at the margin, but every company operating as an "OSS startup" has to know from the start that their software can't be charged for directly.
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: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18874400" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18874400</a> 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 better than you while you waste time creating this free thing that other people free-ride off of.<p>More on unity: <a href="https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2019/01/unity-engine-tos-change-makes-cloud-based-spatialos-games-illegal/" rel="nofollow">https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2019/01/unity-engine-tos-chan...</a><p>Here's the main difference between unreal and unity. Unreal costs 5% royalty per sale, meaning their product is extremely expensive to the developer if sales are high. Unity is generally royalty free and relies on "support and services" to make money. This is why Unreal will always encourage the growth of the ecosystem while Unity jealously guards the actual profit centers of the business, because Unity makes nothing on its core product!
When you give money to redhat, you buy insurance that if you encounter a problem, they will support you. It is expencive, but there is clearly a lot of work involved in producing new release. IMHO redhat deserves its money.<p>When you give money to Oracle, you are financing lawyers who try to find the best way to make you pay more without improving the software.
> It is hard to imagine [AWS, Microsoft, and Google] ever paying for open source software.<p>It's surprising that someone setting out to write about the changing economies of open source ends up missing the point so thoroughly. These companies are some of the biggest contributors to open source.<p>What they aren't likely to want to pay for is a site license from some company trying to sell them a MongoDB under terms practically identical to what Oracle does for Oracle DB. That's the "CD" model the article could make a comparison to.<p>I don't think we're ever going to have something like an open source version of the Oracle model that's equally sustainable, just like the notion that you're going to buy an entire album to listen to one song isn't coming back.<p>Rather, open source is going to be something where you might run a database like PostgreSQL, and if you're a big enough user contribute to its development, either yourself or by paying some support company of core devs. That company might also provide support, or you could go with another provider for that etc.
Honestly at this point I would rather use Closed Source software than Open Source that isn’t “Free as in Speech”. It’s a wolf in sheep’s clothing. At least closed source is honest about its intentions.<p>I use Free Software not because the price, but rather so I can be Free. So I can know I am free to use software I develop with it in whatever way I want.<p>I find the push to market open source by limiting it’s use one of the most distasteful things in recent software history.
It is a good read, with good insights. The conclusion - "This tradeoff is inescapable" is true only to the extent that a new model for open source does not arise. Stepping back a couple thousand feet, open source is an amazing thing - a bunch of people alone or in collaboration, building great things which other people then use to build other ... etc. If we can find a way to sustain this it would be great.<p>It is to me absolutely clear to me that Amazon is benefiting from the work MongoDB has done, and without commensurate compensation. (Is anyone proposing Amazon does not benefit?) And having watched Microsoft embrace, extend and extinguish way too successfully, it is at least a concern that the effect of Amazon's action will be to the long term detriment of MongoDB.<p>This to me is the problem that must be solved. One possibility is to modify the OSS model and licenses by creating a distinction between the members of the community and non-members like Amazon and Apple. If you want to use any OSS software (with the new license) then you must become a contibuting member of the community. If you don't want to be a member, then <i></i>NO<i></i> OSS software is available to you. In other words, Amazon could not pick and choose which OSS to use, but only to be a member of the community with all the benefits or not.<p>I'm not saying this is the answer, but I am saying this is the problem we need to solve.<p>OSS is an ecosystem - one that should and must protect itself from predators.
I work on an open core business model, and we spend a fair amount of time thinking about ways to prevent third parties from stealing our lunch.<p>CockroachDB has an interesting model, where they've tried to closely couple their open source and premium products. This coupling makes it harder for third parties to build against the open source and even easier for enterprises to use it.<p>Do people here have examples of companies that are taking innovative approaches to the licensing/OSS question?
Mostly FUD of a supposed opensource monetization debacle on the aftermath of Amazon DocumentDB.<p>Not every opensource monetization scheme is the same. Mongo and Gitlab are not the same. One is mission-critical production software, the other is a productivity tool (which can become critical, but in a different manner), thus different ways to monetize. Hashicorp, Canonical, Mesosphere and NodeBB are not nearly the same. Why put everyone on the same pot?<p>Opensource is not an industry. Opensource is a guarantee, a certificate of transparency. Opensource is global-scale collaboration. And much more.<p>Neither is everyone <i>moving everything</i> to fully-managed PaaS, at least not in the way described by the OP, who assumes a lot of givens there. Many use cloud infrastructure, but not all the services, some have private clouds or other hybrid setups.<p>Application platforms are constantly changing, why now assume Mongo or any other opensource models are doomed? MongoDB Inc. is a public company and is perfectly capable of defending their bottom line against a magnificently sized but over-committed competitor like AWS. Mongo has NOT done a good job with their PaaS or enterprise tooling so far, competitors have popped up, so now they have to up their game, that's all.<p>To underestimate OSS monetization is very presumptuous. To compare musical recordings, an end to itself, to infrastructure mission-critical software is downright stupid.
I don't like the assertion that the only thing that was valuable on CD's was the convenience, not the music. I'd argue that the copyright itself is the reason the music industry had pricing power. As everyone knows, they lost the pricing power with the rise of piracy platforms and it became too costly to try and keep the market cornered as services like Spotify and Pandora started to make deals with several labels. At some point the major labels had to throw their hands up and and capitulate. It's worth noting however, that the most powerful artists- people like Taylor Swift and Garth Brooks retained their distribution rights and did not capitulate for a long time. This is further evidence that the copyright is what creates the shortage that creates the pricing power.<p>It's really no different from the pharmaceutical industry. The cost of making the first pill of a new drug is billions of dollars. The cost of the second is basically zero. Yet drugs are extremely expensive because the companies that develop them have complete pricing power for several years because nobody else is allowed to manufacture that drug.<p>I think the point he's making whether directly or indirectly, is that MongoDB made a miscalculation in open sourcing their software at all. I would agree with that except that one would have to wonder whether there is anything so unique about MongoDB's software that would enable them to exert much pricing power. In other words, would MongoDB risen to the level popularity they did if the software was not open source?
MongoDB is choosing a dinosaurs business model, and it's going to hurt them and their ecology.<p>Mongo the org should play MongoDB like Google does Kubernetes, Golang, Chromium, etc. Have your people in there, funded, steering the project as 'FOSS' while you release actual products.<p>Mongo dropped the ball by having no on-ramp product like GCPs Firebase. Their Cloud provider hate is just a flailing reaction to bad business and existential fear.<p>Stop being a crybaby when someone makes a few forms and buttons that spins up a vm with your DB software running. Of course cloud providers would want a tight integration with their systems.<p>Managed Kubernetes on AWS makes k8 stronger, managed Firecracker on GCP and Azure makes Firecracker stronger.
I think Stratchery made a mistake in think this is about open vs closed source, but rather it's down to Amazon's desire to own core infrastructure.<p>Amazon wants to have an offering in every major database category. Whether you're open source or closed source, it's safe to assume if you get decent marketshare Amazon will come after you.<p>Even if MongoDB was proprietary Amazon would have built a competitor in this space.
This whole thing is a race as software itself gets better and better. Just think about how hard it was to run things 5 years ago before the rapid rise of containers and orchestrators. One person with Kubernetes can easily run a large cluster with hundreds of applications, even with private owned hardware. And this is all free now.<p>Being ahead of the curve with proprietary products is a viable business <i>but just not as big</i> as these companies want it to be. Meanwhile there are thousands of smaller boutique software firms solving problems and making great profits.
Why can't MongoDB can't compete with AWS? Aside from cloud vendor lock-in, and economies of scale that AWS has. Curious if anyone here has experience with hosting using Mongo's enterprise offering. The article makes the point that Amazon is targeting a lower version of the API, can't the enterprise version compete on features?
I find it interesting that the price of storage has essentially flatlined for the past five years, although the cost of hard drives have decreased by about 50 percent over that same timeframe dollar-per-gigabyte (<a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/tomcoughlin/2017/12/20/digital-storage-projections-for-2018-part-1/#41e9a3a13a20" rel="nofollow">https://www.forbes.com/sites/tomcoughlin/2017/12/20/digital-...</a>).<p>Innovations at the 'business' layer may be the best way to compete with AWS, in the way that it captures a large chunk of value generated through OSS. Decentralized cloud platforms essentially take the principles of open source and apply them to the very infrastructure on which software runs.<p>At Storj, for example, we have an Open Source Partner Program that attempts to solve the ‘Amazon Problem’ by enabling any open source project to generate revenue every time their end users store data in the cloud.<p>Storj tracks usage on the network and returns a significant portion of the revenue earned when data from an open source project is stored on the platform. Critically, this enables open source projects to derive sustainable revenue from usage, whether by commercial customers or non-paying open source users.<p>In my opinion, this can help drive and support the next wave of Open Source monetization models (essentially through this concept of 'Commoditize Your Complement" - where the complement is cloud consumption)
Amazon has for years been stealing from merchants on their platform and AWS is just another part of their platform. They are everything we caution people against when they depend on a single API like being a superfluous Twitter client getting crushed, just a much, much larger API.<p>In Mongo's unfortunate case they couldn't stop people from deploying to EC2 before Amazon determined it was worth stealing, but it doesn't even have to be software you use on EC2 it can be your software too.<p>They copy products from third party vendors selling on Amazon -<p><a href="https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-09-27/amazon-s-copy-cat-products-targeted-as-eu-quizzes-smaller-rivals" rel="nofollow">https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-09-27/amazon-s-...</a><p><a href="http://fortune.com/2016/04/20/amazon-copies-merchants/" rel="nofollow">http://fortune.com/2016/04/20/amazon-copies-merchants/</a><p>They even copy SaaS hosted on AWS if the number are good -<p><a href="https://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/03/08/amazon_copies_partner_products/" rel="nofollow">https://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/03/08/amazon_copies_partn...</a>
Michael from MongoDB here. Amazon, Microsoft, and Google are certainly big players in this field, and common wisdom is that they are best qualified to scale, but in this case, we have a clear counterexample. DocumentDB clusters are limited to a single region of AWS. MongoDB Atlas clusters can span the entire globe with low-latency reads and writes in multiple regions. In terms of pricing, DocumentDB is cheaper when you choose to go with 2 instances. AWS achieves this by shifting high availability to the storage layer which in turn means that any failover could require between 1 and 2 minutes to happen - this compares to seconds that this would take with MongoDB Atlas. If you go with the default DocumentDB configuration and use 3 instances you end up paying a premium between 20-35%. With this in mind, it really depends on your use case whether DocumentDB ends up being cheaper for you. In terms of reliability and the hosting service is global, Atlas currently outperforms DocumentDB.
This discussion is new because AWS and others are new and growing rapidly and it's a huge mistake to conflate it with conventional discussions and strategies about open source.<p>The threat is not just to open source but also entire categories of software and hardware.<p>The situation is so dire that you may create a product that does 10Gbs or something else and AWS offers 5Gbs but with automatic snapshots, high availability, scalability and distributed out of the box, and because of ease of use, access, near free management and scale users will still prefer AWS and your market will be limited to a extremely tiny subset requiring some specific niche and willing to configure, roll it out and maintain on their own.<p>This completely changes the incentives to create, because to compete you now need to create a 'cloud native' product that leverages AWS and other clouds. Which means a transformation of traditional open source and entire categories of software as we understand them to something new.
How easy is it to migrate to or away from a cloud service like AWS ? I think the end-game for these cloud giants is to lock you in, so that you simply can't switch to a commodity provider.
How would it be different if whole of MongoDB had a proprietary license? Amazon would do the same thing with the same effect.<p>Open Source is a red herring here - the problem is with selling software when AWS sells “performance, scalability, and availability.”
I'm surprised utility-based software pricing isn't being pursued more. The cloud providers are the natural point to bill.<p>Currently they sell computing resources wholesale to others who then somehow need to monetize it.
(I mean raw cycles, storage and bandwidth are worthless <i>on their own</i>)<p>As a software user, paying a simple usage-based fee that includes compute, storage and software fees would be ideal.<p>As a cloud provider having people develop product that could be used to sell their own base product <i>at no development risk of their own</i>
would be advantageous.<p>Also as a software development group not having to deal with the complexities of scaling the platform can have advantages.
The next open source model I see being successful is one which open sources it’s code, but keeps models proprietary.<p>Say I build a system for detecting of pigs leave their pen. Open sourcing it lets people build models for sheep, cows, and chickens. With resources I improve those models and provide additional tuning for onsite locations. There is an open source solution with code and community models, but I provide an “accuracy guaranteed”, upgrades, and maintainence.<p>We can even lease the hardware (cameras, field GPU boxes, etc.), want a new model for kids in a school yard, no problem! I’ll do that for you, it’ll be $100k and I retain rights to the model.
<i>> No, they are still not selling music; in fact, they are beating piracy at its own game: the music industry is selling convenience. Get nearly any piece of recorded music ever made, for a mere $10/month.</i><p>I find it more convenient, to have a DRM-free backup of the music I paid for. Sure, streaming is useful, but not when it's available in the form of rent only. That's why I'm using Bandcamp and not Spotify.
Is it possible to let people use software freely, but if they make money from a service that uses it, you have to pay for it? This seems to me to be the fairest approach, particularly in a hosted environment. Think of something like codepen.io but instead of premium pricing they only charge you when you process payments. In a way, this is what the App Store and Play Store are already doing, no?
My question - how badly did Amazon get burnt by using Oracle?<p>In databases in particular Amazon seems to be on a huge kick to not have to pay anyone else. Even if they end up with a bunch of quasi-overlapping products (SimpleDB, DynamoDB, MongoDB) they just seem very aggressive here. At this rate they are going to have 10+ database offerings in the future.
Open source works if you:<p>- Treat your OSS projects like MARKETING tools, not revenue streams.<p>- Offer a freemium version of what you produce (e.g., offering a "Pro" version that's well-maintained and adds valuable features).<p>- Back your projects with services (e.g., consulting, fast support, "off the shelf" implementations, enterprise workshops, etc.).<p>- Back your projects with paid support.<p>- Scale your performance expectations of the business to the cash flow of your services.<p>If you want to make money off of OSS, you have to run a business. It's the responsibility of the project's creators to deliver products and services utilizing their technology to provide something better than others can (and charge for it).<p>Otherwise, keep it closed source.
I'm the furthest thing from a lawyer, but wouldn't it be nice to say my software is open source, and you can use it in your software, but if the software product you're selling with my software in it is making over $X, you have to pay $X?<p>Or, even more generally, is there a legal way to protect your code from being taken advantage of by the top 1% of companies? Could that become popular?<p>If I help a million developers and companies make money, fine, but it is immensely frustrating how the Amazons and Googles of the world reap so much of the benefit.
I don't see why big companies like Google, AWS and the like wouldn't fund open source development, precisely because they have realized great returns using those softwares to reap monetary benefit. If I were a CEO and my core business was built on OSS, I would allocate budget to help the projects used within my organization. It's just common sense to do so. Reality might be different but then that makes for some really short sighted decision making on behalf of those companies.
Amazon has had a documented past of taking massively successful Open Source projects and adding their own bells and whistles to it and upselling them.<p>Amazon is the new Microsoft.
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.
The 'Why Software Should Be Free' case assumes the software exists at all. I think this is the case for a lot of common infrastructure software and I think these will continue to move to open source.<p>But without a license payment much software might not be available at all.
Maybe the proper way to fund open-source is just governments, altruistic companies and users, not selling? To some extent all of those already happen but growing so slowly, funded open-source software % growth could be sped up.
Everybody follows<p>Speedy bits exchange<p>Stars await to gl@ow"<p>The preceding key is copyrighted by Oracle Corporation.<p>Dupl@ication of this key is not allowed without permission
from Oracl1e Corporation.<p>Copyright 2003 Oracle Corporation.
I thought the speculation was that DocumentDB was running on postgres and its just the API that's compatible. Open source might have played a roll but wouldn't this move from amazon be just as possible with a closed source API?
The economic reality of building software is that it is enormously expensive. Yes, you could develop your own operating system, compiler, UI frameworks, databases, etc. Or you could use something that already exists and works and focus on creating something new instead. You'll never get around to building something new if you first have to reinvent countless wheels.<p>That's why there are only a handful of widely used operating systems, many of which are Linux based at this point and all of which depend on many small OSS components. It just takes too much effort to get to the same level of functionality. The two notable exceptions are Apple and Microsoft that both choose to maintain their decades long investments in their respective software stacks. Even Microsoft has recently joined the club and is now doing open source openly. Sound economics and it has done wonders for their valuation.<p>Another reality with software is that its value decreases over time. It inevitably becomes a commodity. Design, algorithms, and successful features find their way to competing products and inevitably one of them gets distributed under a very permissive license. As that happens, the way to differentiate and stay valuable (and relevant) is to improve what you do, how you do it, and how well you do it.<p>This is the economic problem MongoDB is facing: their added value is tanking and they felt they needed to make their already quite restrictive license even less permissive to be able to get more revenue from their users. This makes the product harder to use commercially unless you pay (which is intentional). However, this causes people to look for alternative solutions and causes many of them to find their way to competing products.<p>The predictable result: several competing products now offer more or less drop in replacement functionality with most or all of the technical features that made MongoDB so cool just a few years ago. Amazon just capitalized on that by launching their own (closed source) product.<p>The long term economic success of OSS is tied to its development community. This requires ongoing investments to happen. An OSS community is usually not a single company that owns the software but the collective of users and developers of the software that together 'own' the software and derive value from it. There are certain types of software projects out there that are so essential to so many companies that they thrive for decades and are pushed forward by companies and people pooling resources through donations, active contributions, etc.<p>This requires a pragmatic attitude to licensing. We just saw frenemies Google and MS join forces around chrome. That is not charity: they both have a big enough economic stake in that project to put their differences aside (which are considerable). The licenses are key to facilitating such communities between mutually distrusting entities like that. It fundamentally has to facilitate the software can be used freely by anyone; that is the basis for collaboration.
The irony is that MongoDB brought this on themselves. They created a market for “like MongoDB, but reliable and secure” but were unable to deliver it themselves.
I'll be interested to see what Jepsen[1] makes of this. MongoDB traditionally lost a lot of data when there was a split-brain in the network. According to the post, AWS is a re-implementation of MongoDB v3. Will Amazon's implementation fare any better?<p>[1]: <a href="https://aphyr.com/posts/284-call-me-maybe-mongodb" rel="nofollow">https://aphyr.com/posts/284-call-me-maybe-mongodb</a>