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Comment by bradrydzewski | Hacker News Reader

mongodb announced the Server Side Public License change less than 12 weeks ago. When you account for end of year and holidays, building a new product line and rolling it out in such a short period of time seems unlikely. I would guess this has been in the works for a while (although admittedly I could be overestimating engineering effort and underestimating amazon engineering talent).

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MongoDB could have been having conversations with Amazon prior, trying to negotiate a licensing agreement. These negotiations take a lot of time at corporations, I could easily see someone saying "hey, MongoDB's starting to squeeze us, let's get some people working on Plan B before they cut us off".

Reverse engineering the MongoDB API, getting it to work on Aurora storage engine, verifying existing CLI/drivers work and having it all scaleable and supportable.

At least a few months work there. Even for Amazon.

Lawyers move slower than software engineers. There could have been years of exchanges between the company prior to this.

Difficult to know for sure, but it's probable that MongoDB made Amazon aware that they would introduce such a licensing change, in a bid to put pressure on AWS and get them to contract with MongoDB.

It didn't work.

You're absolutely right. AWS is not known to move that fast (though they are known to move faster if they think the competition is outpacing them).

This undoubtedly had been in the works as Aurora for MongoDB.

The timing is suspect, sure. But one look at Aurora for MySQL and Aurora for PostgreSQL will tell you that AWS would've gotten around to it regardless of licensing.

I was told on Twitter that the DocumentDB project is over two years old at Amazon. Mongo 3.6, the version whose API they claim to clone, came out about 15 months ago.

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