I agree, I think Docker is an example on how to almost completely fail to take advantage of being first to market. Redhat, AWS, Google and others were quicker to monetize on docker (the runtime) than Docker the company.
Docker are actually an example of a pattern, one that also impacts MongoDB and many other companies. That pattern is that they intentionally branded the product and the project with the same name (in this case Docker) to help with slipstreaming on the community mindshare they were building.
The flip side of that which eventually comes home to roost though is that it means the two are easily confused . If I'm a customer and I can download X or buy X from you, and the two are virtually identical, you better have a damn good story as to what your value proposition over and above the project is.
Red Hat actually arguably only just got themselves out of this. Originally there was just Red Hat Linux, regardless of whether you paid them a cent. The split into Fedora (Core) - the free distribution - and RHEL - the enterprise distribution with paid support subscriptions - is a not insignificant part of why the company still exists today. This transition was not without controversy, and arguably created the space into which Canonical and Ubuntu emerged, but it was a necessary step to disambiguate the project and the thing people actually pay for with its own value prop and messaging around it.
It's somewhat surprising that so many of these companies proclaim they want to be the next Red Hat, but ignore the prior art for how that came to be.
I don't see anything Mongo could have done differently. Even if Mongo were completely proprietary software, it wouldn't have affected AWS. They didn't use Mongo's code just emulated their API. That's basically the same thing that kicked off the entire PC industry -- clean room cloning BIOS.
This has already been settled in the courts: APIs are not subject to copyright and may be freely reverse engineered, provided the usual cleanroom methods are followed.
After the Google vs Oracle case i thought the courts decided the opposite of what you are saying: APIs are copyrightable and Google will have to pay aot of money for using them in Android.
> After the Google vs Oracle case i thought the courts decided the opposite of what you are saying
Are you posting from the future? Because it isn't after that case yet; Google plans to appeal (given that they filed for an extension to the 25th of this month) the latest Federal Circuit decision to the US Supreme Court and, if that doesn't succeed and end the case in Google’s favor, the next step would be a third trial in the District Court, followed—however that turns out—by another appeal by one side or the other to the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, possibly another petition for en banc rehearing after that appeal, and potentially another appeal to the Supreme Court.
The flip side of that which eventually comes home to roost though is that it means the two are easily confused . If I'm a customer and I can download X or buy X from you, and the two are virtually identical, you better have a damn good story as to what your value proposition over and above the project is.
Red Hat actually arguably only just got themselves out of this. Originally there was just Red Hat Linux, regardless of whether you paid them a cent. The split into Fedora (Core) - the free distribution - and RHEL - the enterprise distribution with paid support subscriptions - is a not insignificant part of why the company still exists today. This transition was not without controversy, and arguably created the space into which Canonical and Ubuntu emerged, but it was a necessary step to disambiguate the project and the thing people actually pay for with its own value prop and messaging around it.
It's somewhat surprising that so many of these companies proclaim they want to be the next Red Hat, but ignore the prior art for how that came to be.