Open to the core: MongoDB's enterprise push in 'joins' U-turn

Something different this way comes

But it was two other commentators that really laid the issue bare, and suggested a fundamental problem with the Open Core model.

First, Federico Grillini declared: “This is a basic feature for a dbms, not an enterprise one.”

In other words, while $lookup might differentiate MongoDB from other NoSQL databases, it only brought it to parity against Oracle or MySQL. With MongoDB’s additional benefits of dramatic flexibility and scale, however, this might have ended the argument.

But a second problem, and much more foundational to MongoDB’s model, was highlighted by John Crenshaw:

The decision to limit this to enterprise makes the feature unusable, even for enterprise users. Stable modern software development requires that developers be able to run and test their code in local isolated environments. This means that developers have all of the necessary tooling running locally, on their own $500 laptop… These local environments will never include software that has a $10k licensing cost.

As such, prospective MongoDB users would have to make a choice between “violat[ing] the isolation of development environments,” which introduces a host of issues, or simply avoid the $lookup functionality. In Crenshaw's view, you “would have to be bone dead stupid to choose [the first] option.”

Which may be why MongoDB reversed course and made $lookup an integral part of its community build.

You expect me to pay for value?!?

While logical, this doesn’t solve the revenue quandary for MongoDB and other open-source companies. At least, not in the IT infrastructure space, including databases.

While proprietary infrastructure vendors don’t have to worry about this Jekyll and Hyde split between community and enterprise builds (you only get access if you pay – no exceptions), that model is dying. As Cloudera chief strategy officer Mike Olson lays bare: “No dominant platform-level software infrastructure has emerged in the last ten years in closed-source, proprietary form,” which means that: “You can no longer win with a closed-source platform.”

However, he also points to the one open-source company to make with a pure-play open source model: Red Hat. Because of this population of one, Olson concludes: “You can't build a successful stand-alone company purely on open source.”

Reality bites

This means that MongoDB, like every other open source company, needs to figure out ways to sell something other than open source, and feature-level differentiation, for the reasons stated, won’t do. Not for the stuff that really matters, anyway. Otherwise the community build, meant to be an on-ramp to enterprise payola, instead becomes a roadblock to adoption.

Instead, MongoDB will need to keep adding value to the tooling around its database, such as Ops Manager and Cloud Manager. This is basic approach taken by Cloudera and DataStax (Cassandra), and it’s really the model that Amazon Web Services uses, as well. Charge for simplifying the operation of the product, not the product itself.

That appears to be the only approach accepted by the free-loving community. ®