In 2016 I wrote that “cloud convenience is killing the open source database.” It didn’t. Instead, as I noted more recently, open source has remained relevant even as cloud companies seek to make it easier to manage. That said, there’s reason to believe that open source matters in a very different way than some of its most ardent defenders believe.
Convenience isn’t the only thing that developers care about, as RedMonk’s Stephen O’Grady has stressed, but “for developers, convenience trumps most other technology characteristics.” Yes, open source is included in “most other technology characteristics.”
