Did the MongoDB pay for their Linux distros? GCC? Git? How much are they paying to the FOSS projects they used to build their software for sale?

They probably report issues back and so on.

How much AWS shares its profits with GCC, qemu, etc? Not at all besides the bare minimum that benefits them.

(And don't misunderstand me, I don't see Mongo as some kind of underdog here, but making big money from software is hard, even if - or exactly because - valuations - and funding - are in the sky.

And AWS is fundamentally a different kind of business than what open source usually is. It has a compounded networks effects / economies of scale effects. And on top of that it has a closed source management layer, but that is largely irrelevant, except for Mongo in this case.)

Fair point, but if you strip any money from product development, this implies you don't have a budget for further development and maintenance, except if you make it support-intensive. And for what gain? That very few cloud providers make more money and enslave customers into their walled garden? Cloud providers don't even need to provide QoS or support - they can just shrug and say "we're running an OS project as-is". If no money can come your way, then development and support is simply not sustainable.

The projects you mention: Linux+git development has good financial standing from companies who could be seen as going (or having gone) aggressively against commercial Unix from a business PoV. gcc thrived on freedom enthusiasm but has seen many, many patches from commercial vendors wanting their OS, CPU or whatever supported.

Intent matters.

Linux, gcc, git OSS projects are less concerned about capturing value from the economic activities enabled by them, which is why they were all set up as not-for-profit enterprises; the expectation is that donations will help cover their operating costs.

MongoDB on the other hand is a for-profit enterprise that took VC funding in the hope that they'd be able to cover their operating costs in the long term without donations.

The only way to do this is to capture some of the value offered by the NOSQL paradigm, but it appears that the cloud providers are beating them at that game, which is why they needed to change tactics, to guarantee their survival as a self-sustaining entity.

That's a great perspective that I had not thought about before.

Fair point, actually.

CosmosDB is Microsoft's proprietary solution. According to [1] started already in 2010 to support their own online services.

[1] https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/azure-cosmos-db-micro...

I wish it was Mongo under the hood. Our migration to Azure almost crashed and burned because, aside from the extortionate pricing model for Cosmos, their "Mongo API" is noticeably incomplete (in our case, they didn't support the array positional operator, and still don't [0]). Nowhere do they have an API compatibility checklist or anything articulating less than complete support for all features--the positional operator has been in Mongo since version 2.4, five years ago. (version 4 is what's current now).

IMO, Azure remains a garbage fire of half-finished features in almost every offering. We replaced Cosmos with a Bitnami-authored canned VMs pre-configured for a simple Mongo cluster (which make up a significant portion of "features" they offer), which failed to restart after the Meltdown cloud reboot because the Bitnami management software corrupted the disks. Now we just run our own VMs with our own Mongo instances and curse the day we were obligated to move to Azure.

[0] https://feedback.azure.com/forums/263030-azure-cosmos-db/sug...

> I think MongoDB, Inc. raises a valid point wrt. developers doing all the hard work including community building and a million other things, while "cloud providers" get all the money.

I think MongoDB is free loading off the the community and developers. The developers don't get to use the software to make a profit without kicking some money upstream to mongo either. Is Mongo going to start offering money for bug reports and patches or do they get to freeload off of their community?

I think you're overestimating outside contributions to these types of projects. In my experience, they are typically minuscule, and mutually beneficial relationships when they do occur.