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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."
Well, that is free ... as in free utterly without restrictions.
You can't make the core thing not free, but you can freely take it and put it into your commercial product.
There are situations where the GPL or similar license works, and there are places where the BSD model works. I've worked on products which had some BSD stuff in it (the Berkley DB stuff). I've also used LGPL stuff.
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.
GPL is 'free' in the sense that you can do anything you want with it as long as it fits what the GPL says you can do, but you are still restricted by the GPL.
It's just a different philosophy that says "this is stuff we want people to have and use as they see fit, and we don't put any obligations on what you do with it later".
The GPL says "you are free up to the point of the terms of the license", the BSD license says "you are free to do whatever you want to do with it".