Techcrunch Gives the Finger to Journalism and Kicks Newborn Puppy While Slapping Your Mom

In the latest segment in the endlessly long syndicated program entitled “Every Thing is On Fire at Journalism’s House” we have Techcrunch writing an article about the new but only Wednesday mid-day level news of Amazon Web Services launching the DocumentDB service.

I’ll let you guess what the title of this article, written by Federic Lardinois, is running in a (formally) respected tech news source.

A: “AWS Launches New DocumentDB service to take on MongoDB”

B: “MongoDB challenged by Amazon Web Services new DocumentDB Service”

C: “AWS gives open source the middle finger”

D: “You can earn $100 an hour working from home buying stuff online! Click here!”

At this point D is a solid guess so no shame there if that’s where you went, but the answer is actually C. C! “AWS give open source the middle finger” is the title of an news article and it’s blowing my mind. Also, and this is the real kicker here…spoiler alert…no they didn’t.

AWS launched DocumentDB today, a new database offering that is compatible with the MongoDB API. […] In effect, it’s a hosted drop-in replacement for MongoDB that doesn’t use any MongoDB code. […] AWS argues that while MongoDB is great at what it does, its customers have found it hard to build fast and highly available applications on the open-source platform…

No argument here…

It’s also no secret that AWS has long been accused of taking the best open-source projects and re-using and re-branding them without always giving back to those communities. […] MongoDB was one of the first companies that aimed to put a stop to this by re-licensing its open-source tools under a new license that explicitly stated that companies that wanted to do this had to buy a commercial license.

That’s a perfectly fine solution. AWS no longer uses MongoDB or they pay for it. Seems fair, but the article goes on to list several quotes from MongoDB executives and even describes them as “feisty.”

“However, developers are technically savvy enough to distinguish between the real thing and a poor imitation. MongoDB will continue to outperform any impersonations in the market.”

That kind of thing. Then after that Lardinois ends with a quick aside that mentions that AWS has actually been better about giving back to open source lately, but MongoDB is pissed because they “bypassed” their license. The end.

That’s it.

Did I miss the middle finger?

Did I miss the part where you told everyone about the new service AWS was offering?

Did I miss the part where MongoDB actually gave solid reasons why a company would want to run and scale MongoDB themselves rather than pay AWS to do the dirty work?

Lets review and see if we can find that middle finger…

1. Amazon used MongoDB, which was an open source product.
2. MongoDB didn’t like that so they changed their license to force Amazon to pay to use it.
3. Amazon stopped using it and made their own similar product.
4. MongoDB got super mad and stuff and called their buddy at Techcrunch to tell him all about it.

Did MongoDB actually give the finger to open source? Did Techcrunch give the finger to news? Did AWS do what all big tech companies do and you can choose to use their products or not? Is this the first time I’ve been to Techcrunch in years? Can you end an article with a series of questions?

(Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes.)

via Hacker News