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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."
I'm not comprehending enough of it.
I've consistently seen Aurora MySQL performance worse than RDS MySQL on writes, and overall, a carefully tuned (in a way you can't tune RDS or Aurora due to lack of access) MariaDB instance on EC2 will utterly annihilate Aurora and RDS on overall performance, for same instance sizes. Of course, a bare metal setup of the same size (same CPU cores, same RAM amount) will annihilate the EC2 instance on performance and at about half of the TCO over three years, but nobody seems to care about that these days.
deserve everything they get.
Just manage your own damn IT infrastructure you lazy sumbitches, and then you'll get as much performances you're willing to devote time and resources to. But if you're a cheapstake cloud sucker, you get what you pay for.
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
These guys keep saying "open" and then they keep complaining about what others do with the source. Open means you don't get to control what other people do.
If MariaDB cared they should have used the AGPL. This has been an issue with open source for a long time now. Solutions are available, and you need to think before using the license.
1) BSD - if you want your code to be used as many places as possible (even if you don't know about it)
2) GPL - If you want to get paid when people use your code, either by keeping it free (redistribution/returning modifications), or by dual-licensing.
3) AGPL - When you want to close the loophole here.
And we can also add that the GPL3 closes the tivo and patent loopholes. Decide what you want, and choose the right license, otherwise you'll end up whining like Michael Howard.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Firebird (aka Interbase) has always outperformed and out-featured the others especially with very large data sets. To this day it beats everything else yet it languishes in obscurity.
That is a flat out lie. There is a reason the only people using that garbage are the same folks still using Delphi
"When life gives you lemons, don't make lemonade. Make life take the lemons back!" -- Cave Johnson
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.
They aren't following the spirit of the GPL. They are being anti-social: taking from the labors of others, and not contributing back.
There is no law against being anti-social, so they are free to do it.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
You need the AGPL for the daemons, and an updated LAGPL for core network libraries. To ensure the library itself, even if used on the backend, is source-available, while also allowing proprietary webapps to build atop it so that it gets commercial interest and backing.
The next generation of successful open source is going to be AGPL/LAGPL, and the MIT/BSD supporters are going to be reminded once again why developer-libre+closing source is diametrically opposed to end-user libre, and of communal benefit.
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.
MariaDB is better at modeling joins. It's important, though not a primary key. Even if you're starting with a 3D model, MariaDB can still do a table scan if your table isn't optimized.
Fixed it for you:
"MariaDB CEO Accuses Oracle and AWS of Strip-Mining Open Source"
Can we at least get the title right? The article said NOTHING about "large cloud vendors". Only Oracle and AWS specifically.
We use it in production because it outperforms everything else.
Do you have benchmarks?
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Remember: there is no cloud, just other people's computers. In this case it is Amazon's computers.
And Amazon will rip you off if they can get away with it. Why is Bezos so filthy rich? Exactly.
That's a naive statement.
FOUNDED... yes... in some cases.
But on an ongoing basis, most big/useful open source projects are funded primarily by corporate sponsors, who contribute money, talent, or both. Many companies contribute in-kind services, by assigning personnel either part or full-time to open-source projects.
Another similar funding model is having a corporate parent that does consulting, hand-holding, hosting, etc. while opening the source for all. Yet another is the spin-off project that a parent organization needs for their own purposes, but is unrelated to their primary business. By open-sourcing, they get extra eyes on the project to find bugs, round-out capabilities, discover new use cases, etc.
FEW important open-source projects are purely or even primarily volunteer indie projects!
Unfortunately, this means that open source projects often have to kowtow to their corporate sponsors, and can suffer a sudden loss of talent and viability when they are "cut off" by a corporate sponsor.
A good example of this is jQuery Mobile, which the jQuery Foundation still refuses to declare dead. Adobe pulled the plug years ago, it is Dead, Jim! A distant memory in the rearview mirror, but a ghost repo and ghost website remains, sitting there snagging unwitting third-world developers who think that it is still A Thing.
Considering the origin of the company promoting it, I think you're right.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Amazon's RDS offerings are really convenient, from the perspective of making snapshots and setting up replication. But, I have never been able to push their default 'SSD' storage past 60MB/s. (PostgreSQL and Mysql) That's terrible. That's less than USB 2, and even some SD cards can do that! Our on-prem can do 180MB/s on spinning rust and around 550MB/s on (obsolete) SATA SSD. If you want anything better on RDS you have to REALLY pay a premium for IOPs and transfer, or pay a premium for way more ram and a ton of caching, in addition to external caching in the rest of your stack. I have not used Aurora on RDS, so I don't have a comparison, but I have my suspicions. It would be pretty easy to just give you a few more MB/s and make it look a whole lot better. Luckily in our case we could optimize things enough that storage performance didn't matter too much. But RDS storage performance is so pitiful that it's seriously worth considering putting your DB on a bare metal box somewhere with NVME storage and just put up with the network latency and get 50 times the storage performance (and more ram and cpu while you're at it ) at a fraction of the price.
The 'spirit' of the GPL? What is this - poetry class?
No, it's Slashdot, didn't you notice? Enjoy your stay, get an account.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
There's no real legal backing for sharing as a service though. And the GPL requires legal restrictions on making a copy to have teeth. If you don't accept the licence, that's fine. You don't get to distribute the software because that's a copyright violation
Copyright doesn't really cover running software on someone else's machine. You might consider it "public performance" but I imagine that would be seen as something of a stretch in court. The FSF really needs a better mechanism if it wants to prevent this.
It's not that they intentionally cripple it to rip you off. It's that you are using a shared resource. Performance needs to be consistent for everybody including those on the same server your Tennant is on. Azure is the same way with Office 365 Exchange. If an executive has 1 TB of archives in Outlook God help you! The networking is throttled on Azure so any PowerShell commands are useless
http://saveie6.com/
The guy's complaining about "giving back", but I'm 100% certain there are people working on MariaDB who haven't "given back" to the artists who produced the music and movies they listen to and watch.
The old saying about leading by example holds true. If you want someone to abide by your licensing agreements and "give back" to the community, you have to start with yourself and your employees (or the equivalent version). If you think it's acceptable to ignore all the copyright laws and licensing which comes with music and videos, then it's acceptable for everyone else to ignore any licensing requirements on your software.
The spirit of GPL is to allow the user to do anything, Amazon in this case is the user.
- Raynet --> .
how does this situation "prove the superiority of BSD"? Amazon could do the same thing if maria were BSD licensed.
Amazon isn't prevented from what they're doing by maria's GPL 2 license. These are just whiners. Whining stops nothing.
In fact... this kind of service has always been held up as a shining example of how businesses are *supposed* to make money off of GPL.
The spirit of GPL is to allow the user to do anything,
That's not really true, anything but deny others their freedom. Amazon made changes to mysql and didn't release them to the public. (Legally they don't have to, of course).
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
I guess you never read the GPL.
OK, I'll keep it in mind.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Yeah, I don't really go stronger than citric acid honestly.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Yes but I can't publish due to NDA
Dumbest shit I have heard all day. Firebird is a relic with no direction and no discernible advantage over *ANY* other RDBMS. Its SMP support is still "being worked on". It doesn't even have a reasonable mechanism for multiple processes to communicate with one another. Spin locks were how concurrency was done for the longest time.
Like I said, the only people still using it are legacy folks or the suckers still paying Embarcadero for their crummy "platform".
"When life gives you lemons, don't make lemonade. Make life take the lemons back!" -- Cave Johnson
So if anyone who works on your IP in any sense has ever violated anyone else's IP, you have no right to complain. So when those MariaDB people pirated Black Panther, the fact that one guy who worked at some point in his life listened to music he downloaded illegally makes the whole movie fair game? Cause that's stupid and your point is stupid.
Your ad here. Ask me how!
The GPLv2 allows you to take from the labors of others without giving back. It's right there in the preamble:
This was not some failure of Stallman and Moglen to consider and incorporate a term into the GPL -- it is an intended feature. The GPLv3 section 2 is even more explicit:
But you're not happy with that. Instead, you invoke a fictional "spirit of the GPL" in order to take away the freedom to change the work unless the recipient meets additional conditions, something that is expressly forbidden by GPLv2 section 6 and GPLv3 section 10:
and
So no, you are not following the spirit of the GPL. You have decided to unilaterally change the GPL into the AGPL, which it is not and cannot be. MariaDB has decided that now that it has obtained the benefits and usage base afforded by selecting the GPL, it wants to retroactively place its code under AGPL-like terms without consequence. You're both the ones being anti-social by failing to follow through on the principles and promises that you purport to follow. Now go away, hypocrites.
Firebird is a relic with no direction
...which just released the first beta of the fourth version...OK.
and no discernible advantage over *ANY* other RDBMS
No discernible advantage, like basically zero configuration, making it suitable for hassle-free embedding into application products?
Its SMP support is still "being worked on".
As opposed to all the other software which will never ever change its architecture again? Software that isn't being worked on is software that is dead.
Ezekiel 23:20
Secondly, it's as if you didn't even read the GPL. Why did you ignore the stated intentions? Right at the top, the intentions are stated:
the GNU General Public License is intended to guarantee your freedom to share and change free software--to make sure the software is free for all its users.
The stated intention is to make sure the users can share and change free software. MariaSQL/MySQL is free software, and so are the changes Amazon made, changes which they've hidden. The intention is clearly that Amazon's users could share and make changes to this hidden code. Therefore you must admit that Amazon is not following the stated intention of the license, they are not following the spirit of the law.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
I have. You're arguing that Stallman and Moglen made the same mistake not once, but twice, years apart, and after seeing exactly how the GPL v2 operated.
From your own link explaining the four freedoms:
Notice that freedoms 0 and 1 are separate from freedoms 2 and 3.
This part? "To protect your rights, we need to make restrictions that forbid anyone to deny you these rights or to ask you to surrender the rights. These restrictions translate to certain responsibilities for you if you distribute copies of the software, or if you modify it."
The one that makes distribution optional, and separates the freedom to modify from the freedom to distribute as well?
But somehow cloud service providers don't qualify as users.
It is not. Neither the philosophy nor the preamble nor the license itself demands that anyone distribute their modifications. This has been an open feature ever since the licenses were publicly released. and only now are certain licensors (that have the ability to change their licenses to the Affero GPL but do not) and other members of the community (who oddly enough do not fork the project under the Affero GPL, probably because the fork would be rejected out of hand) seeking to impose additional restrictions.
I must not. It is not the stated intention of the license, the very existence of the Affero GPL demonstrates that it is not the intention of the license, and the license certainly is not the law.
If these licensors are violating the "spirit of the GPL," then show me any authority at the FSF that has adopted that accusation as their own. I'll wait...
Fine. The intentions, as stated here 12 years ago:
If you picked a non-Affero GPL license, you were warned. You either intended or were willfully blind to the foreseeable result.
End of story.
Are you drunk? Your comment is not clear and focused.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
How is this for clear and focused:
GNU AFFERO GENERAL PUBLIC LICENSE
Version 3, 19 November 2007
Premable
The person seeing a non-existent "spirit of the GPL" is the one who's not focused.
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