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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."
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.
"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.
"Datagram for Mongo!"
The argument is that they shouldn't be restricted with what they can do with it as that takes away freedom.
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.
You seem to presume that using BSD code in a non-open source manner makes the original code non-open source.
Huh?
"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.
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".
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".
It does reduce developer freedom, in order to increase user freedom. The users are who the program is for, so their freedom is most important. The developers may also be users; they both gain and lose freedoms by using the GPL. They have a choice to make, whether their rights as a user or their rights as a developer are more important. Of course, if they don't distribute the code to third parties, they don't need a license; if they do, then those other parties would most likely benefit most from use of the GPL, not the BSDl.
Most software is used by multiple parties, and so the GPL preserves more freedom than it impedes.
Many major contributors to Linux have stated outright that they contributed to Linux rather than a BSD specifically because it used the GPL, and as users, they stood to benefit from others' contributions which might never see the light of day under a different license. And lo, Linux is more popular than BSD today.
GPL is the superior license for users, and users outnumber developers, most of whom are also users. GPL produces better results than BSD. QED, GPL is the superior license.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"