Weekly Journal 164 - DNS Hosting, AWS

DNS Hosting

This past week I migrated my DNS hosting over to DNSimple. The process was fairly simple, and I learned a little more about how to make DNS changes without incurring downtime. Despite having a separate vendor, I think I like the idea of having my DNS hosted externally. In the future if I need to change cloud providers again, it should be easier to move my services if my DNS hosting isn’t combined with everything else.

AWS Account Closed

With my DNS migration completed, I no longer need my AWS account. There have been several changes over the past year or so that, in my opinion, make AWS borderline hostile to hobbyists. The last straw for me was when they started charging monthly for all IPv4 addresses, but overall their pricing model has been evolving to target large enterprise customers while becoming riskier for hobbyists to use. For me the risk of accidentally running up a large bill is just too great. I don’t have any hobby projects deployed at the moment, but next time I want to experiment I’ll be doing with a cloud provider that has a pricing model that better accommodates hobbyists.

Redis Relicensing

I’ll file this under disappointed, but not surprised. Matt Asay has written yet another article defending the practice of relicensing open source projects, this time in support of Redis. A reminder that Matt works for MongoDB, one of the first companies to pull the rug out from under their open source community and contributors by switching to a proprietary license. While I fully agree with the point that the big three cloud providers should be contributing to the open source projects they build service offerings around, the idea put forward that the license change only impacts cloud providers who would offer Redis as a service is really poor.

The unwritten social contract around open source is that everyone gets to gain value from the software, not just the project owner. In the article Matt claims that outside contributors can still fix bugs and open pull requests, but why would they bother when they get no discernable value from doing so? A licenses like the SSPL places all the value in the hands of the project owner and shares none of it with community.

Another key principle of open source is the ability to take the source code and use it to build something new. This is impossible under the SSPL as the code owner holds all the cards. The most one can do with projects like Redis and MongoDB is provide them free maintenance labor if you want to help them fix bugs. Don’t be fooled, this is a proprietary wolf dressed in non-free, source-available sheep’s clothing.