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You are right. AWS did not acquire the DuckDB technology itself, which is MIT-licensed open source and governed by the DuckDB Foundation which holds most of th
by aratob 23d ago
You are right.
AWS did not acquire the DuckDB technology itself, which is MIT-licensed open source and governed by the DuckDB Foundation which holds most of the related IP [1].
What they did acquire is DuckLabs, the Amsterdam-based services and development company behind the technology which is owned by and employs the creators and major contributors.
And MotherDuck is a US-based venture-funded commercial company, whose cloud-based data platform is centered around DuckDB but has been significantly expanded recently, including Python pipelines, an agentic context layer, and a visualisation layer.
[1]: https://duckdb.foundation/ https://duckdb.foundation/
[2] https://ducklabs.com/ https://ducklabs.com/
[3] https://motherduck.com/ https://motherduck.com/
- stingraycharles 23d agoInteresting to see how they will update their About page. Currently it says “Today, DuckLabs remains independent and fully owned by the original creators. We've deliberately chosen not to take venture capital, so we can focus on sustainable engineering, correctness, and keeping DuckDB open and MIT-licensed for everyone. “ Future will tell if that ends up being true.
- Bjartr 23d agoThe past tells us not to hold our breath
- speleding 23d agoThey now updated it. That bit is indeed gone.
- basch 23d agoStill says >Independence: We are fully founder-owned and not externally funded. Our priorities align with the long-term health of the project and its users.
- xingped 23d ago>...sustainable engineering, correctness, and keeping DuckDB open and MIT-licensed for everyone Hah. Never have I ever heard a sentence that described Amazon less.
- applecrazy 23d agowhat do you mean? amazon maintains a ton of open source projects, including a pure FOSS version of Elasticsearch called Opensearch
- switchbak 23d agoTop-level troll: that's not a "version" of Elastic Search, it's a fork of ES specifically created due to ES's licence change that made it more difficult for AWS to extract money from it at Elastic's expense. Not that I like either actor in this particular play, but this isn't exactly an example of community oriented goodwill on Amazon's part.
- solidasparagus 22d agoNo one's asking for "community oriented goodwill", just "sustainable engineering, correctness, and keeping DuckDB open and MIT-licensed for everyone". OpenSearch is a perfectly good example of Amazon maintaining an openly licensed open-source project.
- hawk_ 23d ago:-D Yes I think motherduck is going to get ... well motherducked bad by AWS
- wakaru44 23d agoI can’t tell if you are trolling or just oblivious. Open search wasn’t precisely born out of the kindness of their heart and their defence of FOSS values… it’s more like a predatory practice to capture market.
- cthalupa 22d ago
- BorisMelnik 23d agosmells like redhat