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Comment by aratob | Hacker News Reader

You are right.

AWS did not acquire the DuckDB technology itself, which is MIT-licensed open source and governed by the DuckDB Foundation which holds most of the related IP [1].

What they did acquire is DuckLabs, the Amsterdam-based services and development company behind the technology which is owned by and employs the creators and major contributors.

And MotherDuck is a US-based venture-funded commercial company, whose cloud-based data platform is centered around DuckDB but has been significantly expanded recently, including Python pipelines, an agentic context layer, and a visualisation layer.

[1]: https://duckdb.foundation/

[2] https://ducklabs.com/

[3] https://motherduck.com/

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Interesting to see how they will update their About page.

Currently it says “Today, DuckLabs remains independent and fully owned by the original creators. We've deliberately chosen not to take venture capital, so we can focus on sustainable engineering, correctness, and keeping DuckDB open and MIT-licensed for everyone. “

Future will tell if that ends up being true.

The past tells us not to hold our breath

They now updated it. That bit is indeed gone.

Still says

>Independence: We are fully founder-owned and not externally funded. Our priorities align with the long-term health of the project and its users.

>...sustainable engineering, correctness, and keeping DuckDB open and MIT-licensed for everyone

Hah. Never have I ever heard a sentence that described Amazon less.

what do you mean? amazon maintains a ton of open source projects, including a pure FOSS version of Elasticsearch called Opensearch

Top-level troll: that's not a "version" of Elastic Search, it's a fork of ES specifically created due to ES's licence change that made it more difficult for AWS to extract money from it at Elastic's expense.

Not that I like either actor in this particular play, but this isn't exactly an example of community oriented goodwill on Amazon's part.

No one's asking for "community oriented goodwill", just "sustainable engineering, correctness, and keeping DuckDB open and MIT-licensed for everyone". OpenSearch is a perfectly good example of Amazon maintaining an openly licensed open-source project.

:-D

Yes I think motherduck is going to get ... well motherducked bad by AWS

I can’t tell if you are trolling or just oblivious.

Open search wasn’t precisely born out of the kindness of their heart and their defence of FOSS values… it’s more like a predatory practice to capture market.

I would agree that they very much had business decisions around the fork - but calling them malicious is bizarre.

They used the software in a way that complied with the license. When the license changed to no longer suit them for future releases, they forked from the original license.

Remove the names here, and in context, every single person familiar with open source projects and licensing would think this is a nonissue. They used the software as the license was intended, and exercised the rights given to them by that license. That freedom to fork if they don't like where the project is going, or things change and the project is no longer viable for them with the new license, is one of the key freedoms enshrined in the whole FOSS movement.

Amazon is actually pretty good about open sourcing core technologies like that. Firecracker is a big one. They also support Valkey and pay some of its maintainers.

smells like redhat

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