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Monday, January 14, 2019

stratechery.com stratechery.com

It’s hard to not be sympathetic to MongoDB Inc. and Redis Labs: both spent a lot of money and effort building their products, and now Amazon is making money off of them. But that’s the thing: Amazon isn’t making money by selling software, they are making money by providing a service that enterprises value, and both MongoDB and Redis are popular in large part because they were open source to begin with.

Ben Thompson of Stratechery does a great job here of summarizing the drama surrounding AWS' DocumentDB launch, but more importantly, he captures the complexity of running open source projects and businesses based upon them in the age of the hyperscale cloud provider.

I'm a huge believer in open source, and its been a large contributor to my career. Making money off of open source has always been a challenge, and fundamentally the only business that has been able to really do it at scale is RedHat.

I don't believe that user-hostile and provider-hostile licensing is the answer, but Ben's post here definitely shows that the path forward is not yet clear.

Watching
James May's Cars of the People
S02E03 "Steam Power"

James explores the wilder shores of motoring to discover what happened to the cars of the future that we were promised. From improbable steam cars and ludicrous jet turbines, he reveals how the petrol engine and the power it gave us came to dominate the 20th century. He takes to the waves in an amphibious car, risks his life at the wheel of a notorious electric scooter and takes a hair-raising trip in the fastest driver-less car on earth.

Watched on Trakt

View on Trakt
Watching
Shark Tank
S10E10 "Episode 10"

First into the tank are brothers from Provo, Utah, who introduce their fun and adventurous treasure hunt game experience for cities across the country; entrepreneurs from Cedarburg, Wisconsin, and New York City present their line of affordable and ethical streetwear that donates a school uniform to a child for every purchase; cousins from Dallas, Texas, present their eco-friendly product that helps wipe away your bum; entrepreneurs from San Jose, California, pitch their hands-free pet tool that makes bath time easier.

Watched on Trakt

View on Trakt