Re:Microsoft acquires Citus Data (YC S11)
by pas on Thursday January 24, 2019 @04:23PM
(#18993113)
That's not the question.
The question is of game theory. MongoDB Inc. invested a lot into developing MongoDB, they figured out the right semantics for a lot of things, trade offs, UX/DX (user and dev experience), and so on. (Recently Mongo4 added transactions. Which is a very very very handy thing in any DB.) But MongoDB calculated that they will recoup their investment because they are in the best position to provide support and even to operate Mongo, all while keeping Mongo sufficiently open source (you can run it yourself on as big a cluster as you please, you can modify it for yourself and don't have to tell anyone - unless you're selling it as a service, pretty standard AGPL).
Now AWS took the API and some of that knowhow, and invested into creating something that's not open source at all. You can't learn anything from it, you are not vendor locked in, because the API is standardized, but other than that it takes away a revenue stream from MongoDB Inc. (Sure, competition is good. DocumentDB-Mongo is probably cheaper than MongoDB Inc.'s Atlas.)
But the question is, will this result in less/slower/lower-quailtiy development of MongoDB itself?
Usually big MongoDB clusters at enterprise companies are not likely to upgrade and evolve, they usually get replaced wholesale, but they would have provided the revenue for MongoDB Inc to continue R&D, and to allow them to provide that next gen replacement. Now ... it'll be likely AWS something-something. Which will be probably closed source (like DocumentDB) and at best it'll have an open API (like DocDB Mongo).
Is it fair? Is it Good for the People? Who knows, these are hard questions, but a lot of people feel that AWS doing this somehow robs the greater open source community, and it cements APIs, concentrates even more economic power, and so on.
The question is of game theory. MongoDB Inc. invested a lot into developing MongoDB, they figured out the right semantics for a lot of things, trade offs, UX/DX (user and dev experience), and so on. (Recently Mongo4 added transactions. Which is a very very very handy thing in any DB.) But MongoDB calculated that they will recoup their investment because they are in the best position to provide support and even to operate Mongo, all while keeping Mongo sufficiently open source (you can run it yourself on as big a cluster as you please, you can modify it for yourself and don't have to tell anyone - unless you're selling it as a service, pretty standard AGPL).
Now AWS took the API and some of that knowhow, and invested into creating something that's not open source at all. You can't learn anything from it, you are not vendor locked in, because the API is standardized, but other than that it takes away a revenue stream from MongoDB Inc. (Sure, competition is good. DocumentDB-Mongo is probably cheaper than MongoDB Inc.'s Atlas.)
But the question is, will this result in less/slower/lower-quailtiy development of MongoDB itself?
Usually big MongoDB clusters at enterprise companies are not likely to upgrade and evolve, they usually get replaced wholesale, but they would have provided the revenue for MongoDB Inc to continue R&D, and to allow them to provide that next gen replacement. Now ... it'll be likely AWS something-something. Which will be probably closed source (like DocumentDB) and at best it'll have an open API (like DocDB Mongo).
Is it fair? Is it Good for the People? Who knows, these are hard questions, but a lot of people feel that AWS doing this somehow robs the greater open source community, and it cements APIs, concentrates even more economic power, and so on.