Open Standards, Licensing

and Open Source

Lessons from Microsoft’s Move to Open Source
Mark Stone, August 2023
"Linux is a cancer that attaches itself in an
intellectual property sense to everything it touches."

-Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, 2001

The Open Hardware Era

1981 1984 1987

IBM PC Compaq Portable MS-DOS

IBM publishes the IBM Compaq releases the first Microsoft releases the DOS
non-IBM PC that is IBM operating system as an open
Personal Computer
compatible standard
Technical Reference
Manual an open hardware
standard for the PC
The PC Revolution
PC sales from 1981 to 1995:

It is better to lead an open standard than own a

proprietary standard
A Larger Slice
Growing market size vs. growing market share:

Market Owner
The Growth Curve of Adoption

Innovate Iterate
The tension in moving to open source
Community: Microsoft:
Would Microsoft, as intellectual property owner, Giving up source code control carries potential
continue to act in good faith after an open legal risks.
source release?
Blending Open Source with Open Standards
MongoDB - A cautionary tale
Foundational Rapid Fear of
innovation adoption imitation
MongoDB’s Server Side Public License
“The reality is that once an open source project becomes interesting, it is too easy for large cloud vendors
to capture all the value but contribute nothing back to the community.”

“Obviously, this new license helps our business.”

Really? Is that obvious?

Development without competition does not yield innovation; it breeds complacency.

Cassandra and Stargate
Apache Cassandra
- Wide column tabular data
- Peer to peer, so massively scalable
- Used by the likes of FedEx, Home Depot,
T-Mobile, Netflix, Apple, Goldman Sachs
Stargate
- Data gateway to Cassandra
- Apps access Cassandra via gateway APIs
(REST, GraphQL, etc.)
- Dramatically expands the use cases for
which Cassandra is applicable
mquery and Mongoose
mquery Mongoose
- A specification describing how to query a - Elegant MongoDB object modeling for
JSON-oriented document store node.js
- An open source project under the MIT - An open source project under the MIT
License License
High level JSON API flow
Request:
Mongoose
- mquery command to JSON API via HTTP
- Parsed by JSON API mquery parser
- Passed to Stargate Super Shredder
JSON API - CQL command to Cassandra via CQL

Stargate Data Gateway Response:

- CQL response to Stargate via CQL

- Recomposed JSON to JSON API
- mquery response to Mongoose via HTTP

Cassandra Cluster
Driving Innovation in Two Directions
Document Database Community:
- Cassandra as an additive option, not a
competitor
- A bigger tent, open to more, and more
diverse developers
- Every Document Database, including
MongoDB, benefits
Cassandra Community
- Mongoose + JSON API + Stargate
- Adds novel use cases to Cassandra’s
capabilities
- Requires Cassandra innovation to support
those use cases
Parasitic versus Symbiotic Competition
In a zero sum game, each new competitor is parasitic, only gaining adoption at
another competitor’s expense

In a win win game, a new competitor can be symbiotic, bringing new adoption that
benefits all competitors

Bringing Cassandra into the Document Database community is just such an example of symbiosis.
Thank you!