As I said elsewhere, it's not. It's an open source project, under the Linux Foundation umbrella, with all of the good licensing that goes along with that. It has some contributors who are also IBM employees, but to say they're "funded by IBM" is a bit of a stretch.
FWIW, most of the code and docs contributions have come from non-IBMers [0]. That said, IBM has done a lot of great work building the foundation and initial community and without them, OpenBao wouldn't be here. :-)
Speaking for myself, but I do not get any monetary compensation from IBM and I suspect this is true for all of the other non-IBM contributors.
I wouldn't say "Mongo is on life support" – it's actually a very successful business growing 30% YoY on a massive scale. Yet, I agree that the license switch has definitely damaged their long-term ecosystem.
I think anyone who administers mongodb would agree it has a list of very dangerous behaviors for novices.
Try to upgrade a running instance node between some versions, and one may thrash object keys or worse. Best to dump and re-load your data every major upgrade to recover all set properties... and there still may be slight differences in the query language later. Wait, your data sets are 1.5TiB per node.... that is a lot of downtime...
The cursor, projection, and re-format queries can be very good at reducing reporting traffic. However, the 3 page long syntax can be unreadable to the uninitiated. The json essentially jams a bunch of equivalent SQL queries in 1 transaction, but you still have to be careful as there is no real guarantee of ordering without auto-indices in clusters.
mongodb is not as clean as SQL, but works for storing constantly changing meta data. i.e. if you find your SQL schema ends up with tuples that have a lot of poorly designed null entries, table edits, and or simply implements an object storage class abstraction in massive meta-data and object-class catch-all tables.
And yes, the mongodb new licensing model telegraphs an unfavorable policy posture. However, I do understand not wanting fortune 500 companies exploiting your teams time for free.
Profit is not an indication of quality, but rather fiscal utility. ;-)
While the article and significant sentiment in threads suggest a push off MongoDB toward PostgreSQL, I do think MongoDB has its own place in the stack and that it won't be obsoleted. I've personally had many pleasant experiences working with it in past projects.
Regarding business metrics, I may have a slight bias coming from the startup world but we often value revenue the most, especially in the earlier stages of a company; we can reduce costs and perform various optimizations in the future but what stays at the foundation is whether or not there is strong product market fit such that more customers keep coming in and coming back to use the underlying product — I would say MongoDB's current growth trajectory is in line with that.
I'm hopeful overall that they can turn profitable (maybe not this year or next but eventually so).
HN should be full of Mongo's users and advocates, and yet this site loathes it. That by itself is a sign that it's a zombie.
The reason we don't just look at revenue is that you can "buy" revenue with ads and sales teams. But if that revenue growth costs more than it pays because your customers aren't sticky, then your business doesn't work. You can't apply startup principles to this large, aging public company.
I was totally expecting someone to come up with some vanity metric here, but a negative EBITDA of several HUNDRED MILLION? Jesus. How did that happen. B2B business should be a symphony of ka-chings for them.
You'd probably save time if you directly suggest what income metric you want to use. In the video, Buffet is basically saying he cares about income after interest, tax, depreciation and amortisation. In other words, that he cares about actual income. That'd be very on-brand for Buffet.
That measure won't be good for MongoDB Inc. either; they've been millions in the red for years. Losing $100 million in a year would be the best result they've achieved in a while now.
Buffett's criticism is that EBITDA is just accounting and he cares about cash flow, specifically also after paying for CAPEX (which is Investing Cash Flow so comes after Operating Cash Flow)
EBITDA is used in the industry because it is a proxy for operating cash flow. Sometimes you don't have all the available data needed to get to OCF, or you're looking at company guidance (for future EBITDA values) or analyst estimates. It's easier to keep the conversation at the EBITDA level because it requires fewer assumptions. Generally the revenue line is ~easy to estimate because you can conceptualize how to go from the current number of customers to some future number of customers, how many dollars per customers and so on and so forth.
Then as you work your way to EBIT (Operating Income) you still have to assume some gross margin, R&D expense, etc. These are pretty tangible. It should be pretty easy to get to estimated EBIT from what the company discloses in guidance or what analysts forecast. Since D&A is pretty linear over time, people generally assume it just remains constant as a % of revenue, so now you have EBITDA which is very much like cash flow
EBITDA is similar to cash flow because it adds back to EBIT the non-cash expense that is D&A. The reason it's good to look at it before interest and taxes is because you're also thinking about how much cash the whole enterprise generates, not how much cash goes to equity holders at the end (which is often called "Free" Cash Flow because it's not tied up with commitments to others)
Coming back to Buffett, in the industries he tends to pick stocks from, CAPEX is a major thing. Companies need to build factories, buy equipment, etc. So if you just look at future EBITDA without accounting for future CAPEX needs, you're fooling yourself.
Truth be told, in those industries everyone also looks at "EBITDA minus Capex". Maybe they do so now that he's bemoaned everyone for not doing it in the first place, but IMHO his criticism largely doesn't apply among valuation professionals. Maybe it does for stock traders, but not for valuation purposes like in an M&A context
Hedge fund investor here chiming in for all of you financial wizards. Hint: don't look at EBITDA. Look at (Atlas) revenue, billings, (current) remaining performance obligations, and operating cash flow. On cash flow, some people decide they want to subtract stock comp (i.e. don't add it back in the GAAP Net Income > OCF reconcilation), but that's a whole other philosophical debate that the investing community has not settled on.
Can someone tell me what their licensing changes are?
We help developers manage API keys, DB access tokens, certificates, and other types of secrets across all of their infrastructure – providing smooth native integrations with k8s, terraform, github actions, any local development setup, and much more.
For some teams it's just a philosophical decision, but many larger enterprises have mandatory requirements which makes OSS software much easier to adopt (this is in relation to infrastructure products of course).
You mean that enterprises would prefer on-prem, right?
But if I'm an engineer working on a large enterprise, what's the difference between a SaaS providing an on-prem option, and an OSS? It's not like I can just git clone a repo and run it on my large enterprise cloud environment.
Given how much of a PITA Vault is, I think it's time for people to move on from it (especially that I'm hearing this is financed by IMB to keep their Vault competitor going).
Appreciate the fork, but I think it's time for people to move on from Vault and other HashiCorp tools (especially that I'm hearing this is financed by IMB to keep their Vault competitor going).
I honestly believe both you and the Akeyless folks should join the steering committee once one forms, and together work towards common standards y'all can benefit from.
