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Comment by manigandham | Hacker News Reader

I don't see how any of that is true. Customers want managed services, why aren't vendors meeting that demand?

For example, why hasn't Datastax rolled out a cloud offering on AWS yet? All this time and they have no solution. Even ScyllaDB just launched a minimal service this year. I would expect a db vendor to be able to wire up some APIs and at least get a basic deployment running instead of complaining about AWS offering it first.

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Even when they do, there is a problem. They specialize in DB code. AWS specializes in infra... and can just take the DB code as well. That is a pretty huge competitive advantage (while the db company has to develop that second specialty). Even worse, there's the further monopoly advantage that companies can just role it into their AWS bill instead of doing another vendor evaluation. The fact that Amazon has almost all the competitive advantages for offering someone else's code it what seems unfair.

(the one they don't have is the ability to offer super specialized support and modifications for their customers, which is where a lot of the database companies have made their money - on consulting)

The DB vendor who created the database is worse at running it than AWS? No, that isn't true.

If you don't want others using your source code then don't be open source or use a different license. There are thousands of closed proprietary products out there doing just fine, for example all of AWS own managed services.

Right. But we want open source to be strong and Amazon is undermining it. You don't care, but we do.

That's a repeat of the same statement. Exactly how is it being undermined? Nothing is stopping you from working on open-source software.

> For example, why hasn't Datastax rolled out a cloud offering on AWS yet?

Umm... they do (https://www.datastax.com/platform/amazon-web-services). Instacluster also has an offering. Which kind of highlights the problem.

Didn't see that before. Still a poor implementation compared to what's available. And I mentioned Instaclustr, so if you're fine with them offering Cassandra then AWS is no different.

My point is that there is a reality that AWS can offer even a crummier, more expensive version than someone else, and it will still garner the $'s.

Sure, because that's what customers are fine with. Again the argument has nothing to do with open-source. Everyone has the same challenges when competing with a bigger company selling the same thing.

It's not because they are bigger.

Even when Amazon wasn't the largest company on the planet, anyone offering services on AWS had a hell of a time competing on equal footing with AWS offering a similar, if inferior, version of the service. It's not unlike when Microsoft was competing with application vendors... except in the case of open-source you're competing with your own code.

DataStax made a major deal with Google instead:

https://www.datastax.com/platform/google-cloud-platform

It's not a great implementation, the biggest advantage is consolidated billing. Unfortunately it's also ignoring the biggest cloud so they have no excuse against AWS launching this service.

Because they have limited resources and have to support existing customers? And they were doing the right thing by contributing everything back to the open source community and weren't expecting Amazon to offer a service?

That's called business competition. Should startups shut down because a bigger company might be selling the same thing?

There's no expectation of contribution with open-source software and the vast majority of users don't add anything. That's how it goes. If you don't want to give it away, then simply don't give it away.

DB vendors earn revenue by charging for features, support and services, just like AWS. There's nothing stopping them from selling proprietary closed-source products and I can name dozens that are doing well.

"There's no expectation of contribution with open-source software and the vast majority of users don't add anything. That's how it goes. If you don't want to give it away, then simply don't give it away." - Vendors are wising up to it now and changing their licenses. Amazon definitely took advantage of this before the days of AGPL. I agree that there's no expectation of contribution. As I said before, it just discourages open source in general because of what Amazon might do. My original comment was in response to someone asking how Amazon is able to launch these services quickly. My response was that the bulk of the work is being done by someone else. I guess that's not new. On the retail side, Amazon takes products that sell well and then offer an Amazon Basics version of the same product.

As did millions of other users and companies. If you give away source code then people will probably use it. Don't do it if you don't want that to happen.

If they're changing licenses now then good for them, but you could say they also took advantage of the free marketing from open-source and now put most of the development into enterprise versions. There's no right vs wrong side here.

There's a difference between people using it and making money off it. What Amazon is doing is putting a wrapper around other people's hard work and claiming it as their own.

They've never "claimed" anything like that. What does it matter who worked on it? They gave it away. Don't do that if you don't want to.

Do you also have a complaint against the numerous vendors offering managed Postgres? Or is this just relegated to some databases you specifically like?

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