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MariaDB CEO Accuses Large Cloud Vendors of Strip-Mining Open Source (zdnet.com)
Big cloud companies are "strip-mining open-source technologies and companies," complains Michael Howard, CEO of MariaDB. At their developer conference, Howard accused "big cloud" of "really abusing the license and privilege [of open source], by not giving back to the community." ZDNet reports:
Even as MariaDB grows by leaps and bounds in enterprise computing at Oracle's expense, Howard sees Oracle and Amazon fighting against it. "Oracle as the example of on-premise lock-in and Amazon being the example of cloud lock-in. You could interchange the names, you can honestly say now that Amazon should just be called Oracle Prime...."
In the first keynote, Austin Rutherford, MariaDB's VP of Customer Success, showed the result of a HammerDB benchmark on AWS EC2... In these tests, AWS's default MariaDB instances did poorly, while AWS homebrew Aurora, which is built on top of MySQL, consistently beat them. The top-performing database management system of all was MariaDB Managed Services on AWS. "My first reaction when I looked at the benchmarks," said Howard, was "maybe there's incompetence going on. Maybe they just don't know how to optimize a DBMS." He observed that one MariaDB customer, one of the biggest retail drug companies in the world, had told MariaDB that "Amazon offers the most vanilla MariaDB around. There's nothing enterprise about it. We could just install MariaDB from source on EC2 and do as well."
He then "began to wonder, Is there something that they're deliberately crippling?" Howard wouldn't go so far as to say AWS is consciously doing a poor job of implementing its MariaDB instances. Howard did say, "And then it became clear that, however, you want to articulate this, there is something not kosher happening." Howard doesn't have much against AWS promoting its own brands... But, if AWS's going out of its way to make a rival service look inferior to its own, well, Howard's not happy about that.
ZDNet adds that "it's also quite possible that unoptimized generic MariaDB instance will simply lag behind AWS-optimized Aurora.
"That said, even in this most innocent take on the benchmark results, cloud customers would be wise to take into consideration that cloud instances of any specific software service may not be created equal."
In the first keynote, Austin Rutherford, MariaDB's VP of Customer Success, showed the result of a HammerDB benchmark on AWS EC2... In these tests, AWS's default MariaDB instances did poorly, while AWS homebrew Aurora, which is built on top of MySQL, consistently beat them. The top-performing database management system of all was MariaDB Managed Services on AWS. "My first reaction when I looked at the benchmarks," said Howard, was "maybe there's incompetence going on. Maybe they just don't know how to optimize a DBMS." He observed that one MariaDB customer, one of the biggest retail drug companies in the world, had told MariaDB that "Amazon offers the most vanilla MariaDB around. There's nothing enterprise about it. We could just install MariaDB from source on EC2 and do as well."
He then "began to wonder, Is there something that they're deliberately crippling?" Howard wouldn't go so far as to say AWS is consciously doing a poor job of implementing its MariaDB instances. Howard did say, "And then it became clear that, however, you want to articulate this, there is something not kosher happening." Howard doesn't have much against AWS promoting its own brands... But, if AWS's going out of its way to make a rival service look inferior to its own, well, Howard's not happy about that.
ZDNet adds that "it's also quite possible that unoptimized generic MariaDB instance will simply lag behind AWS-optimized Aurora.
"That said, even in this most innocent take on the benchmark results, cloud customers would be wise to take into consideration that cloud instances of any specific software service may not be created equal."
Amazon basically offers 3 or 4 versions of the same car going from "you rent and maintain it yourself" to "you rent and we maintain and provide a driver for you". However it seems that if you bring your own mechanic and driver, no matter how skillful they are, their drivers and mechanics get consistently and measurably better performance out of the same car depending on the amount of money you pay to them even though they're all supposedly the same cars with the same specs.
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Bascially, all your "customers" are required to do is share the source if they share binaries (in the case of the GPL 2.0) or not remove the license information (in the case of BSD-like licenses). If you can't live with that, don't publish under those licenses.
The problem is that places like Amazon *ARE* "sharing the binary" as a service but then not sharing the modified source. The GPL was written when the primary way of sharing software was via binaries not services.
Nowhere within the GPLv2 license used by MariaDB does it discuss, require or suggest contributing back to the original authors. Please take a few minutes to read or re-read the GPLv2 license. It will only take you a few minutes. Even if you think you've read it before; read it again. https://mariadb.com/kb/en/libr...
The license only covers copying, distribution and modification. It makes this explicitly clear. The essence of the license is that you have the right to use, modify and distribute the software. If you distribute the software or derivative works of the software then you must bestow the same rights on those for whom you distribute the software to.