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> They are not advertising their replacement as MongoDB, either.

I don't really agree there. The service is called documentDB and this is how they describe it [1]:

> Amazon DocumentDB (with MongoDB compatibility)

> Fast, scalable, highly available MongoDB-compatible database

And the first 2 sentences:

> Amazon DocumentDB (with MongoDB compatibility) is a fast, scalable, highly available, and fully managed document database service that supports MongoDB workloads.

> Customers use MongoDB as a document database to store, retrieve ...

You have to read all of that pretty carefully to understand that it's NOT MongoDB (a term they mention 5 times in the first 4 sentences). And if you read it carefully it seems to say it's compatible with MongoDB, whereas the Techcrunch article states it's only compatible with the MongoDB API from 2 years ago.

[1] https://aws.amazon.com/documentdb/

I think the plainest and most obvious reading is that this is not MongoDB but that the migration from MongoDB over to this not-MongoDB would be easy because of the compatibility with MongoDB.

Agreed. Like how Digital Ocean lists their storage as S3-compatible. Amazon's on the other end of it there, Amazon's product's APIs have been copied and a competitor uses Amazon's product name in the competitor's marketing.

Digital Ocean is not advertising that they're AWS S3, just that they're S3 compatible. Like a processor that's x86 compatible, even though it's not actually an Intel 386, 486, etc. Like when computers used to advertise they were IBM compatible even though they're not an IBM PC. Like when store brands of toothpaste say "comparable to Colgate FreshWhite" but they're obviously not Colgate. Like when a startup calls themselves "Uber for horse rental" even though they're obviously not Uber.

> You have to read all of that pretty carefully to understand that it's NOT MongoDB

I disagree. If I see "Blah-compatible" I know it's not blah.

Yeah, this is pretty clear. I do assume it will act the same as MongoDB 3.6, since that's what they claim, but it's extremely clear it's _not_ MongoDB.

Really? Because AWS Aurora is "MySQL compatible" but I assume they did not build it from the ground up. It's surely a MySQL fork.

Do you also assume that every single Web framework in the world are forked from single code base because they are all HTTP-compatible, too?

But even if it's a fork, then I know it's not the same thing. It could be very similar, but I expect some differences.

Azure DocumentDb (now called CosmosDb) also has "MongoDB compatibility" i think so it's not unusual to advertise it as such.

How else should they word it? MongoDB compatibility is the primary feature, of course they would highlight it in marketing.

Any company bets on Amazon not being able to rewrite their software loses the bet. They even have their own CPUs because one of the CPU vendors failed to meet with their demands.

Disclosure: I'm part of the EC2 team at AWS

We launched A1 instances with our Arm-Based AWS Graviton Processors to increase the selection of technology for our customers. It has nothing to do with demands of vendors, and everything to do with increasing choice, providing access to extensive technology ecosystems like those Arm has been building with their partners, and lowering costs.

man, you definitely score 100/100 in corporate PR speak

Amazon was using MongoDB without paying for it.

Do you have a citation for that? AGPL is usually not considered business friendly or a corporate "allowed by default" license, even for internal use.

Contrary to the headline and articles inference I havent seen any indication that MongoDB source or IP is or was actually being used. As you note this all comes down to API compatibility and tangled notions of "proprietary" slash copyright.

Yep. AGPL is explicitly forbidden within Amazon, even for non-customer-facing use, and their open source license lawyers are very twitchy about it.

For some reason I had the mistaken belief that Amazon was offering a curated MongoDB-in-the-cloud service on their platform in the past - before the DocumentDB announcement and API compat. I think this was confusion with Redis.

But then there's even less reason to attack Amazon.

> Is it because of API compatibility? But the notion that one cannot reimplement a public API for the sake of compatibility is in and of itself extremely hostile to the F/OSS ecosystem, given how many products in it are reimplementations of proprietary APIs.

Completely agree with your conclusion, but is this not exactly what happened in Oracle v. Google?

Unless I missed something in the appeals, the result of Oracle v Google was that APIs are copyrightable, but that an implementation of that API for compatibility purposes is fair use.

So Oracle "owns" the Java API, but Google was allowed to clone that API to make Dvalik work with Java source code.

The same should be true of MongoDB's API. MongoDB Inc owns the copyright, but if someone wants to make a compatible API, they should be covered under fair use.

> Unless I missed something in the appeals, the result of Oracle v Google was that APIs are copyrightable, but that an implementation of that API for compatibility purposes is fair use.

The result (so far) of Oracle v. Google is that Googler use was not fair use as a matter of law; that, however, was the result of an interlocutory appeal to the CAFC, and we still have further action at the district court for a judgement, and probably at least one more appeal up the chain, potentially the whole way to the Supreme Court, before we know the final outcome.

> Amazon was using MongoDB without paying for it.

Which AWS service are you referring to exactly? AWS's existing json document DB is called DynamoDB and has nothing to do with Mongo.

An AWS team member mentioned to me on Twitter that the DocumentDB project at Amazon began more than two years ago. Mongo may or may not have known about it directly, but even if they didn’t, they had to expect it.

The difference between AGPLv3 and the new SSPL applies to all work Mongo releasaes going forward. As intended, that difference will make it difficult for AWS to maintain compatibility, which the article points out is limited from the get-go.

Amazon was never using Mongo.

They used Dynamo, and their white paper on it predates Mongo. Amazon was always an Oracle shop and now have dropped that too.

My old company begged AWS for years for Mongo, looks like they finally got around to it.

If they had released this a year or two ago we would have used it. We use Mongo... barely (as in the volume of data barely registers). That's a great example of something better off being handed to a hosting company.

Self hosting MongoDB has always been a pain if you only have a small amount of data in it. The scaling goes one host, master/slave (which existed, though people would argue with you that it didn't), to 7+ separate hosts if you're going to build it properly (2x mongoose with DNS across them, 3x config cluster, 3x data cluster).

That's a hell of a jump for someone only using Mongo incidentally. You can cheat and combine multiple pieces of the cluster on single hosts but if that fails you can then get into weird multi-component failure issues.

It might not have been cheaper to make their own version than to pay MongoDB, but it might still have been worth it to Amazon in that case for a variety of reasons.

My guess on these reasons is that Amazon wanted to integrate MongoDB with their own proprietary algorithms, storage, infrastructure, and/or other solutions they already created. In my experience, databases (even with different structures) use a lot of similar components like transactions, caching, I/O pages, concurrency etcetera. If they rewrite the whole project, they could potentially use many parts that they already used in different projects.

> Amazon stopped using it, and started using its own in-house implementation instead (presumably because it was cheaper to develop it than to pay MongoDB).

I suspect the drive for DocumentDB was more because customers were asking them for it

"So, MongoDB got exactly what they asked for. It's just that, when they forced Amazon to make a choice, they didn't expect one of the options they gave them to be viable. They were wrong."

You're just talking narrowly about Amazon in this comment. What you said makes more sense if you broaden it to commercial users. They might have known FAANG companies, esp Amazon, would just ditch their software if they switched licenses. They might be targeting the companies that can't or won't build a MongoDB knockoff. The companies that will actually pay for their product. That's a huge market.

The product that Mongo offers is not the DB itself, though, but support and cloud hosting (Atlas). In practice, most people really only care about the latter. Now that Amazon is offering a competing service that is compatible, cheaper, and (if we believe their claims) better, the question for those commercial users is whether they'll pay Mongo, or pay Amazon. How do you think that's going to work out?

Depends on how Mongo is run. People going for low-cost, big-company longevity, or ecosystem tie-ins will go for Amazon. People avoiding big companies' complex offerings or bullshit might prefer Mongo. Note the existence of Amazon, Google, and DO havent eliminated the hosting market: more stuff available at lower costs than ever. Mongo might similarily have a shot it they differentiate themselves positively from Amazon.

Yeah, I don't understand it either. There is a company which puts 300 M$ effort into developing something and then another company is using the first company's brand recognition to get a competitive edge while offering zero added value (And no, hosting mongodb in AWS not a new thing, only uninformed people would assume so. When I look around I find services like Scalegrid or MDB Atlas itself which is exactly the thing that AWS is claiming to justify their decision). So yeah, you are right, I can't see how could that be wrong either.

Even assuming that AWS adds no value, what exactly is wrong with offering a "no value added" hosting service and charging for it?

In fact hosting is already a value added, or no one would use it.

Realistically, I think that a large portion of that 300M went to sales and marketing at MongoDB... However, I agree with everything else you said.

”while offering zero added value (And no, hosting mongodb in AWS not a new thing”

That switches the subject from “do they add value?” to ”are they the first?”.

I would think the existence of other companies offering something similar is an indication that it adds value.

Morally it might be questionable, if it puts MongoDB out of business and reinforces the AWS "monopoly".

However, MongoDB selected a free and open source license. This was always in the cards. They went with AGPL to keep the source maximally open for end users, but that never protected their revenue stream. (Some JS SDK companies used it for that purpose, where it makes some sene, but a DB is very different.)

But if they had started with something proprietary uptake would have been very likely much less. And people would have continued to use mysql or Cassandra if they really needed something "webscale".

They recently switched to a new license, inspired by AGPL, that isn’t approved by OSI and probably not Open Source.

So they are trying to eat their cake and have it too.

It's not OSI because it places even more restrictions on usage than AGPL did, but this is very much matter of context and interpretation. If GNU would have created it it would have been welcomed by GNU-ers a lot better.

I sort of agree with their sentiment, but of course they are late to the have-cake-will-have-it-and-eaten-it-too party, as now AWS was able to fork the last AGPL-ed version and be done with it.

I doubt AWS wants Mongo out of business or else who do they have to migrate into and all they will have left is yet another NoSQL now only used in AWS.

I think AWS already identified a lot of "DB tech locked" Mongo users who wanted AWS stamped mongo, or at least they now can undercut/compete-with Atlas.

Even if MongoDB goes out of business, or becomes less popular AWS benefits as they can keep selling to these "legacy" customers their super-stable AWSgoDB, and said customers will just eat it all up without thinking.

This is literally the future open source promised and people wanted: the freedom for a business to be flexible in regards to technology and not get tied into unpleasant vendor contracts and demands.

There's no point in, or place for, spirit of the system vs letter of the system discussions or calls to morality. Mongo does not deserve to survive / exist if it can't make it's offering better than a competitors.

Would Mongo even exist as a company if it had launched as a contract only vendor? Pretty much not... so it can't demand to play both sides.

> This is literally the future open source promised and people wanted: the freedom for a business to be flexible in regards to technology and not get tied into unpleasant vendor contracts and demands.

Oh the irony. Open source is just a development model, while Free Software, if anything, it meant to provide freedom to all users, not just business.

Reinforcing the public cloud oligopoly only reduces such freedom.

So now it's based on the caveat that only small business and solo devs should benefit from the good parts of open source and anyone with sufficient scale should have to pay because Foss based startups deserve to exist regardless of their business quality and that business of certain arbitrary scale should then apply morality to their involvement with Foss.

Well, write the licenses and let's see what traction they get. I'll wager that they will be shot down by pretty much everyone

300 M$ effort into developing something

If only they had! But MongoDB is 1% technology and 99% marketing, they had no technological moat to speak of.