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Comment by tsimionescu | Hacker News Reader

The whole move to new "open-core" licenses started with the most famous (infamous?) AGPL project - MongoDB. The AGPL is not what companies like this want (Mongo, Elastic, Redis etc). They don't want AWS's code: AWS is already providing that. They want AWS to pay them royalties or stop competing.

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> They want AWS to pay them royalties or stop competing.

But the switch from AGPL to SSPL didn't do either of those things.

AWS still built DocumentDB to compete with Mongodb, and didn't use any SSPL OR AGPL code in the implementation (at least according to their FAQ[1]). And AFAIK AWS isn't paying mongo any royalties.

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

Well, I was using AWS more as a catch-all term for cloud. They never actually offered a managed MongoDB service, but other like IBM and Oracle did (or still do?). I'm not sure what impact this had exactly, whether those services were discontinued or if they are now paying Mongo for them - but surely they had a significant impact one way or the other.

> But the switch from AGPL to SSPL didn’t do either of those things.

Well, yeah, its mostly a bad plan, because while it can block competition with your code, it doesn’t block substitution with other code that provides the same function, and if you aren’t one of the big cloud providers, competing in the same function market with bundled services from the big cloud providers, whether or not it is the same underlying code, is the actual problem you face when your monetization is based around “sell a hosted service”.

> They want AWS to pay them royalties or stop competing.

but at the same time, they want people to be able to use the software for free (esp. at the start), to kick-start the network effect.

In other words, open-core business models want to have their cake and eat it. If you are able to make lots of money off said software, we want a piece of it after the fact. But we dont want to take on the risk of actually looking to build a business and compete on the same.

They dont't want AWS royalties. They wanna be able to command higher margins. Since AWS has lower costs and prices, Redis can't compete with good margins. The royalties are just a way to increase AWS costs, so that they raise their prices and give Redis the ability to keep high prices and margins, while still remaining attractive to customers (which don't have a cheaper choice anymore).

They want to make money with the software they built.

No,they want to make money with software they did not build. The Redis company did not build Redis nor are they the biggest contributor.

They want to make ludicrous profits on the software others have built for them.

There's nothing wrong with making money and being profitable. But they have to justify investments taken with greed. This license change is motivated by greed, not by "making money" fairly.

You are privy to Redis, Inc’s financials? You seem pretty confident that they are profitable.

Redis did not build Redis.

Then they shouldn’t have open sourced it in the first place.

Yeah, it feels like this pattern of “ship an open source product, get popular, try to backtrack” ignores the fact that the only reason you got popular in the first place was the open source aspect.

Would anyone have given mongo a look if it was a fully proprietary technology? They would have gone bust years ago.

Great observation!

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