MDB, Opensource, and Cloud

open source
The idea behind open source is you throw your project out into the open, source code (how it is made) and all. If someone wants to change your code…great, make additions, make it better, but you have to a) give the open source project credit” and if you are going to distribute it then you have to distribute it under the same license which then means you need to make your code changes public. In essence contribute back to the project and make it better.

Open source has been trying to deal with the cloud providers use of their software.Typically if a company was going to use your source code and sell it, they had to contribute to the project and help it get better. This ran into a snag because the Cloud providers were just seling the service, not the program so in essence they had a run around the standard GPL license. They weren’t contributing back to the original project. There have been a few different attempts to change some of the common open source licenses such as AGPL, the SSPL (what mongodb did), and BSD (what redis did). All are a response in one way or another the cloud loophole in old open source licenses. Some for code, some for money.

To my knowledge none of these have been tested in court and ultimately you have some HUGE pockets on the cloud side, and a bunch of smaller pockets on the open source side. There are many in the open source community who view these new licenses as overly restrictive and against the spirit of “open source”.

https://www.techrepublic.com/article/why-redis-labs-made-a-h…

A few points about amazon’s announcement.
Emulating the mdb protocol at version 3.7’s, not the database itself. They are probably running postgres behind the scenes.
99% compatibility
6 months free to transfer your data over

My Take
I see amazon’s move into mongo’s territory as a, “oh hell” moment that could be a major issue for MDB’s future growth. Amazon has shown their willingness to burn money to bury competition in the past. There is no reason to think they won’t do the same thing here.

My worries

1)All the young programmers that are familiar with mongodb can now “easily” use amazon to take care of most of their needs.
2) amazon will get better with time.
3) 6 months free is a pretty good incentive to try it out
4) This isn’t going to be settled quickly
5) Mongo is already burning money, this could make them burn more to try and maintain growth rates.

Anyways, take my opinion with a grain of salt. I’m not an industry expert merely an interested casual observer for the last 20 years. I’d love to hear alternate views, I’ve reduced my MDB position by ? even though I don’t think this will affect MDB for at least another quarter.

Best,
Ethan

19 Likes

1)All the young programmers that are familiar with mongodb can now “easily” use amazon to take care of most of their needs.

My alternate view is that “young programmers” is not where the money is but in corporate use of Atlas that need an up to date NoSQL and are willing to pay for the service.

BTW, MySQL never made a penny off me, a not so young programmer. LOL

Denny Schlesinger

6 Likes

Note that AWS options are (more or less) restricted to AWS customers. Not all businesses want to be (solely) AWS customers, particularly for a critical datastore.

So this potentially impacts MDBs growth from AWS customers, in the same way that AWS’s ElasticSearch offering could impact ESTCs customers. Note however, that AWS has had a managed (if somewhat limited - ie lots of tuning options are removed) ElasticSearch service for a long time, and it hasn’t (as far as I can tell) had a huge impact on ESTC as a business.

Also note that customers could have run MongoDB on AWS EC2 instances (server rent by hour) at any time. All the new offering is giving them is AWS’s management (auto backups, auto-clustering etc). Thats a time saver to be sure, but it’s not as compelling (to me) as it might sound.

What I’m trying to say in a somewhat long-winded, pre-coffee way is that AWS MDB is a marginal improvement (over running your own database on EC2), rather than a big new capability.

Also to note, MDB earns money mainly from Enterprise Advanced, which is their enterprisey version of the (open-source) software. This has the additional bells and whistles that enterprises love (security, analytics, management etc), and it seems their sales team are adept at selling this solution. AWS also do this stuff, but this will be the point-of-difference.

It does seem if AWS is starting (continuing) to leverage it’s expertise in distributed software (the main reason I’m invested in Amazon). However, I’m not super-concerned with this development, because the bells and whistles (and customer service) is where MDB need to concentrate anyway.

I just wish the drop was a bit larger than 12%, bringing the price right back to where it was a few months ago :frowning:

cheers
Greg

22 Likes

All the new offering is giving them is AWS’s management (auto backups, auto-clustering etc). Thats a time saver to be sure, but it’s not as compelling (to me) as it might sound.

Probably price. Documentdb will surely be an attractive less expensive option for companies locked into AWS. Lock-in is not so bad if the price is the issue (unlike Cisco, Oracle lock-in which are expensive and ripe for disruption) and AWS is the really cheap in cloud - this I have heard from many IT guys. Most people just buy everything from Amazon for example - don’t seem to care about the lock-in price/convenience seems to be the issue.

I am sure documentdb will continue to improve with time. Not everyone wants the latest bells and whistles.

Questions I am not clear on:

1. While documentdb will only reside in AWS can it pull in data from different clouds? Probably yes
2. Can documentdb work on-prem? Maybe No?
2. Theoretically, the non-Atlas Mongo should continue to grow. But that is just made of support, enterprise edition etc and is growing much slower (~35% vs 300% for Atlas based on my calcs). BTW, I found the following link which explains why the non Atlas part is not attractive.

https://www.quora.com/How-do-MySQL-and-MongoDB-make-money-wh…

So Mongodb may lose some future customers. But will it affect their growth or will it simply get more new customers to transition into NoSQl?

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There have been a few different attempts to change some of the common open source licenses such as AGPL, the SSPL (what mongodb did), and BSD (what redis did). All are a response in one way or another the cloud loophole in old open source licenses. Some for code, some for money.

Note that MongoDB licensed their code under AGPL in 2009. Then changed it from AGPL to SSPL in 2018.

Under the AGPL, MDB granted everyone (even cloud providers) irrevocable rights to the code at no charge, as long as the licensees followed the stated conditions at that time. It’s impossible for MDB to pull these rights from the previously released code.

Anyone wanting to use the current (or future) codebase would have to abide by the SSPL or buy a commercial license.

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Here’s another concern I have here regarding the open source licensing. Some very good information has been posted by “5761796E65” above. I’m concerned partly by Amazon and Document DB, and partly by the move to SSPL in general. I remember years back when gcc, a popular C/C++ compiler, moved from GPL2 to GPL3 licensing. Many companies switched over to clang instead, including the employer I was currently working at. Apple’s SDK for OS-X for example is clang and not gcc precisely due to this. So I’m wondering if changing the licensing model for the open source end is going to have repercussions as well. I understand why they changed, I’m saying I wonder if the market will like it or not. Sitting at a smaller allocation for now while I ponder all this.

Good feedback and discussions everyone!

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IMO this impacts long term growth and renewals. Likely not going to show up for at least a year to 18months as the feature sets are not going to be anywhere near like for like for sometime. As a few of you already said, those looking for managed, less features, or who don’t care about being locked into AWS, will likely make them look hard at it.

1 Like