Robert Haas

Over on TechCrunch, you can find an article posted just yesterday with the inflammatory title AWS gives open source the middle finger. The premise of the article is that, by creating a product which aims to provide compatibility with MongoDB, Amazon is attacking open source.  This is a false narrative.  MongoDB recently relicensed its code in such a way that it can no longer be used by cloud providers without paying license fees to MongoDB.  In essence, then, TechCrunch is claiming that because Amazon is choosing to run code for which they don't have to pay license fees instead of code for which they do have to pay license fees, they're attacking open source.

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Last month, ZDNet published an interview with MongoDB CEO Max Schireson which took the position that the document databases, such as MongoDB, are better-suited to today's applications than traditional relational databases; the title of the article implies that the days of relational databases are numbered. But it is not, as Schireson would have us believe, that the relational database community is ignorant of or has not tried the design paradigms which he advocates, but that they have been tried and found, in many cases, to be anti-patterns. Certainly, there are some cases in which the schemaless design pattern that is perhaps MongoDB's most distinctive feature is just the right tool for the job, but it is also misleading to think that such designs must use a document store. Relational databases can also handle such workloads, and their capabilities in this area are improving rapidly.

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