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AWS Launches Fully-Managed Document Database Service (zdnet.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from ZDNet: Amazon Web Services (AWS) has announced a fully-managed document database service, building the Amazon DocumentDB (with MongoDB compatibility) to support existing MongoDB workloads. The cloud giant said developers can use the same MongoDB application code, drivers, and tools as they currently do to run, manage, and scale workloads on Amazon DocumentDB. Amazon DocumentDB uses an SSD-based storage layer, with 6x replication across three separate Availability Zones. This means that Amazon DocumentDB can failover from a primary to a replica within 30 seconds, and supports MongoDB replica set emulation so applications can handle failover quickly. Each MongoDB database contains a set of collections -- similar to a relational database table -- with each collection containing a set of documents in BSON format. Amazon DocumentDB is compatible with version 3.6 of MongoDB and storage can be scaled from 10 GB up to 64 TB in increments of 10 GB. The new offering implements the MongoDB 3.6 API that allows customers to use their existing MongoDB drivers and tools with Amazon DocumentDB. In a separate report, TechCrunch's Frederic Lardinois says AWS is "giving open source the middle finger" by "taking the best open-source projects and re-using and re-branding them without always giving back to those communities."
"The wrinkle here is that MongoDB was one of the first companies that aimed to put a stop to this by re-licensing its open-source tools under a new license that explicitly stated that companies that wanted to do this had to buy a commercial license," Frederic writes. "Since then, others have followed."
"Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, so it's not surprising that Amazon would try to capitalize on the popularity and momentum of MongoDB's document model," MongoDB CEO and president Dev Ittycheria told us. "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."
"The wrinkle here is that MongoDB was one of the first companies that aimed to put a stop to this by re-licensing its open-source tools under a new license that explicitly stated that companies that wanted to do this had to buy a commercial license," Frederic writes. "Since then, others have followed."
"Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, so it's not surprising that Amazon would try to capitalize on the popularity and momentum of MongoDB's document model," MongoDB CEO and president Dev Ittycheria told us. "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."
Insert row for every flamebait Slashdead SJW fake news article.
This is not the middle finger. This is exactly what the BSD people were on about when they insisted on the "freedom" to take the code and make it proprietary. Their only problem here is that someone else (Bezos) is profiting and not them. You can't take the benefit of getting the "many eyes" to fix your code and then suddenly complain when they use it according to the license.
If you wanted Bezos to keep cooperating then you would have used the AGPLv3. I have never seen evidence that Amazon breaks this license. They are respecting the requests of the license holders, even if that request wasn't what the license holders thought they were asking for.
For normal nerds reading this, it should be pointed out that the MongoDB term "Document" does NOT mean what anyone unfamiliar with MongoDB would take it to mean, i.e. a PDF or Word file.
An Editor would have EDITED the post to clarify that.
But this is Slashdot.
Goodbye Atlas, hello AWS.
Mongo is going to take a beating from this.
"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."
This is what CEOs always say just before they are about to get ass-raped by those very same "imitators" they are bashing. I have no knowledge of the MongoDB product at all but I have a hard time believing that it has any special sauce that Amazon cannot at least in theory replicate and/or improve upon to the point that users will no longer care about the differences. Not saying that will happen but there isn't anything preventing it from happening either.
So they copied Microsoft Azure's CosmosDB?
Microsoft has had this for years. It was originally called Azure DocumentDB and now it's called Azure CosmosDB. They renamed it because it now supports more than just MongoDB [document] (i.e. Gremlin [graph] & Cassandra [cql/wire]). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmos_DB
The only significant difference between Amazon and Microsoft's implementations is currently Microsoft's only supports up to V3.4 of the MongoDB API, but I'm sure they are pushing forward.
This is exactly what the BSD people were on about when they insisted on the "freedom" to take the code and make it proprietary.
I've always been puzzled by that "logic". BSD people argue that they aren't free unless they can do anything with the software including making it no longer free. That seems to be a self defeating argument. It's sort of analogous to the question of whether an omnipotent god has the ability to make itself no longer omnipotent. I don't have any problem with someone favoring a BSD style license for their code but to call it "free" seems illogical or at least misleading to me because it inevitably will become not-free even if it starts that way.
has always been how people get rich.
May Bezos choke on one of his christmas turkey's bones.
No, Amazon is giving close-minded, my-way-or-the-highway childish zealots the middle finger.
Because no one likes working with childish zealots.
At first I thought this story was a repeat from 2015.
https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/nosql-database-service-azure-documentdb-now-generally-available/
"DocumentDB is a fully managed NoSQL document database service that allows applications to query and process JSON data at scale. "
Yeah, Microsoft has since renamed that service to CosmosDB - and made it multi-model in the process - but you'd think AWS would avoid using a competitor's name for a very similar service.
Wasn't there a DocumentDB with Mongo layer already from Microsoft?
You seem to presume that using BSD code in a non-open source manner makes the original code non-open source.
I'm well aware of how BSD code works and never even implied such a thing. What you are missing is that I could give a rip about that. I care about whether the product made with the code can be modified or not. THAT is what freedom means. The code itself is just useless text.
"Do what you want with this" doesn't do a damn thing to the original code - it's still out there, and it's still free for anyone else to do with as they please.
Yes I understand all that and it is irrelevant. The problem is that you are confusing the code with the product made with the code. Maximal "freedom" (for lack of a better word) for the code does not equal maximal freedom for the things made with the code. Code by itself is USELESS until you put it into a product. I care about the product remaining free in the open source or FSF meaning of the word.
BSD's "Do what you want with this" is certainly a lot more free than "If you do anything with this, you have to give everything you do back to us".
You think freedom has something to do with the code. It doesn't - at least to me. Freedom is the ability to modify THE PRODUCT that the code enables. I want to be able to modify what AWS does with the code if it suits me to do so. The code is just the means to that end. I don't care about code, I care about what it lets me do. BSD let's people do things that prevent me from modifying the product to suit my needs and therefore is less "free" at the end of the day. Using a license that you know is going to result in closed-source products and then pretending you are increasing freedom with regard to those products is to completely miss the fucking plot.
Well, that is free ... as in free utterly without restrictions.
The restrictions come later when the code is turned into a product. Are you seriously going to argue that BSD code in a proprietary product isn't a de-facto restriction? All they are doing is leaving it to someone else to decide what the restrictions are but there invariably are restrictions once you use the code to actually do something useful.
You can't make the core thing not free, but you can freely take it and put it into your commercial product.
See that's where you lose the plot. The core thing isn't the code. The code is just a means to an end. What matters is whether the product is free, not the parts of that product. Code is just text. Useless by itself.
The initial recipient is free to do whatever they want, and there is no obligation to pass that along to someone else. As in when you get it, you are 100% free to do what you wish, and don't have any obligations to anybody else.
That seems logical to those who don't think about it very deeply but it completely misses the bigger picture. Nobody uses code. Code is just instructions. What matters is what people DO with the code and what the restrictions on the product are. Your argument only makes sense if you think the code is the only thing that matters. If you use a license like BSD that you know damn well is going to go into closed-source products then you do not get to make the argument that you are preserving freedom for the people who use those products. All you are doing is increasing freedom for some at the expense of many more later on.
Even the GPL won't "protect" you from what Amazon just did. This makes the GPL the worst choice here:
If Mongo wanted to make money, they should have made it proprietary. If Mongo wanted wider distribution they were better off with a easy BSD-style licence.
When AWS offers 'software as a service' the value add is the fact that they have made the investments in hardware, operations and security so that the customer can use the useful features of a software solution without having to deal with the infrastructure and operations. The fact that the code may be modified open source is extremely inconsequential.
If you found out that your yard maintenance company got their gasoline for free, would you complain about what they charged you? Do you have the right to dictate the margins to a vendor or supplier based on how they source their materials? The value is in the operations labor and expertise and if that's a problem for open source developers then don't do open source.
Look up "document" in an English dictionary, then come back and apologise for your stupidity.
-nomsg