Re:Amazon DocumentDB, with MongoDB compatibility
by ProblemFactory on Thursday January 10, 2019 @08:54AM
(#18873794)
I think PostgreSQL does benefit from Amazon RDS and Google Cloud SQL indirectly.
Unlike MongoDB, it is a real volunteer-led open-source projects, and the goal is to provide an excellent database to users rather than make money. Having easy-to-use cloud hosted versions available helps with attracting users, mindshare, and perhaps in the long run developers to the project itself. Having cloud hosted versions from big vendors means that it's easy to justify "we'll use PostgreSQL for this project" to management or clients.
Oh absolutely. I don't think they really thought they could force Amazon to license MongoDB, but I do think they believed they could force Amazon to not offer something that competed directly with Atlas.
That hasn't worked out for them very well.
(Not that I think leaving the license alone would have worked out any better. To the best of my knowledge, the MySQL, Postgres, Redis, and Memcache projects have not particularly benefited from Amazon building RDS and Elasticache on top of them, and I see no reason to think Amazon would have contributed a bunch of great patches upstream for MongoDB either.)