AWS, MongoDB, and the Economic Realities of Open Source | Stratechery

From a timely open source DBMS reality check

"This leaves MongoDB Inc. not unlike the record companies after the advent of downloads: what they sold was not software but rather the tools that made that software usable, but those tools are increasingly obsolete as computing moves to the cloud. And now AWS is selling what enterprises really want.

Worse, because AWS doesn’t have access to MongoDB (it is only matching the API) it only supports MongoDB 3.6; the current version is 4.0.5. It is possible that if AWS’ service becomes popular that MongoDB will effectively stagnate: sure, you can get a better version from MongoDB Inc., but then you have to manage it yourself or go the effort to tie in all of your AWS services with MongoDB’s offering (then again, the potential for differentiation may be MongoDB’s salvation, and an important lesson for other companies)."

AWS, MongoDB, and the Economic Realities of Open Source | Stratechery