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Comment by sciurus | Hacker News Reader

It's got to be a rough day for the team at https://www.influxdata.com/ . This could become serious competition for their InfluxCloud hosted offering.

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We've been expecting this for two years. It was just a matter of when. It validates our space. AWS did this to Elastic, they have competing products with NewRelic, Splunk, SumoLogic, and countless others. All of whom still have healthy businesses.

Our goal remains the same: build the best possible product that optimizes for developer productivity and happiness. And open source as much as we possibly can while maintaining a healthy business.

Can't wait to see your new cloud offering :)

Amazon is the best partner until you prove worth cannibalizing.

This space is growing like mad. They would be remiss if they did not expect something like this.

and for timescaledb, streamlio, two sigma, kdb+ , quasardb ( and perhaps pipelinedb)

QuasarDB employee chiming in - we’re not actually worried, our clients are typically operating at a scale that would make costs very prohibitive for this AWS product.

Having said that, I can definitely see this be an interesting product for people doing less than 10k inserts per second.

> make costs very prohibitive for this AWS product.

Competing with AWS on just cost sounds worrying to me.

Actually not really. We have migrated several customers to AWS and our experience with AWS services are kind of all over the place. S3 is super cheap and reliable and there is almost nothing that beats that but for example CloudWatch is extremely expensive for a large scale operation that is easy to beat with custom software (like Prometheus or something similar). I guess even Datadog would beat them (and they have much more advanced features and integrations). This means that there are multiple software vendors can exist in the same space even when Amazon has an offering in that space.

At what point are open source projects going to change their licensing to prevent the major cloud providers from just stealing their products? I highly doubt AWS built this from scratch. Amazon, Google, and Microsoft are going to choke the life out of these projects

Redis and MongoDB at least seem to have woken up

https://www.geekwire.com/2018/open-source-companies-consider...

Why not? InfluxDB does not have these capabilities.

> At what point are open source projects going to change their licensing to prevent the major cloud providers from just stealing their products?

There's a lot to unravel in there.

I prefer 'free software' to 'open source' as it has a clearer meaning, especially in this context. Even so, no one can steal free / open source software (or as you say, product -- though that turn strongly implies a commercial offering).

By definition you can't really stop anyone from using your free software, unless perhaps you start naming companies explicitly, but I can't imagine it'd be an easy process, or have a happy outcome, if you started targeting 'major cloud providers' for special conditions.

Note that I am not an apologist for AWS, Google, Microsoft, etc - but it feels like the fundamental problem here is not massive corporations charging other people to access free software.

Free software and open source aren't always the same thing though. Free Software is software that through the license enforces a philosophy.

Open source is software that through the license enforces the source code to remain open.

I'm not a fan of RMS or his attitudes on most things, but am a strong OSS fan as it is the best way to develop and maintain software.

> Free software and open source aren't always the same thing though.

Entirely agree, hence I drew the distinction. I eschew 'open source' as it's highly ambiguous, and mostly misses the point.

> Free Software is software that through the license enforces a philosophy.

I would disagree. Free software ensures the user has certain freedoms.

> Open source is software that through the license enforces the source code to remain open.

This is a very circular definition -- open source is open.

> I'm not a fan of RMS or his attitudes on most things, but am a strong OSS fan as it is the best way to develop and maintain software.

As it happens, rms is no fan of OSS.

RMS has said publically that proprietary software should be illegal, and that free software guarantees user freedoms. This is a philosophy, and one that opines every user wants to become a developer. For things like emacs, and much of GNU, this is true, for most of the rest of the world, this is not.

I eschew free software because I'm not about forcing my views on others (which is literally the mission of GNU). I'm about developing software to be the best it can be, and maybe meeting some friends along the way. Open source, being the best software development model overall, allows me to meet that goal. You could almost say some of RMS's more extreme quirks border on authoritarian (see the example with the abortion joke in the libc manual he FORBADE removal of and demanded be re-added when a dev simply overruled him). He's not acting in a manner that encourages "freedom", but as a simple and obvious dictator of all things GNU or claiming to be GNU. He's frequently tried to shape the path of GNOME (which I am a former foundation member and was on the sysadmin team) in areas he literally has no business weighing in on. Then there are some more gross personality problems, like his sexism, or tendency to actually eat his toenail gunk[1], or to ever refuse to be wrong on anything, even when an entire community disagrees with him.

Dr Stallman has done a great deal of good for the world with Free Software, however like the VAX and PDP-11, his time has passed. Open source won just like Linux won over GNU/Hurd. It is ok that he won, by losing.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I25UeVXrEHQ

rms's toenails aside, I'd suggest that every licence is about enforcing a set of views on others. There are plenty of licences to choose from, so it's fairly easy to find one compatible with your own views.

In the context of GP's (beginningguava) comment about 'open source projects' needing to change their licensing to prevent corporations making money by SaaSing various tools, my point was twofold - first, by definition you can't have free software with restrictions like that, and second you'd be merely fighting the symptoms (with little chance of success).

Aside - I'm curious what you mean by the 'open source software development model', as I don't think that's actually a thing.

Fair enough, the open source software development model is no different in reality from the free software development model generally speaking.

It goes back to ESR's The Cathedral and the Bazaar and is what he deems "the bazaar model" or "bazaar style" before him, Larry Augustin, and Bruce Perens (if memory serves) went on to coin the phrase "open source". Even if you don't necessarily agree with ESR (I see him in a similar vein as RMS fwiw), his thoughts on software development models have generally speaking, been proven true.

> Free Software is software that through the license enforces a philosophy.

This is incorrect, licenses like MIT or BSD are also free software license because they afford the 4 freedoms to the user (even though they don't enforce them on derivative works).

Licenses like the Redis one are open-source but not free software because they place limitations on the user (can't sell hosted service, IIRC)

Redis is BSD licensed. You mean some Redis module developed independently by Redis Labs that are not part of Redis itself.

> I highly doubt AWS built this from scratch

Unfounded doubt.

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