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Article Roundup - January 11, 2019

Article Roundup

Amazon DocumentDB
AWS has released a new database service called DocumentDB that is compatible with the MongoDB 3.6 API. This new product has set off a firestorm of tweets and articles with titles like “Amazon Web Services calls MongoDB’s licensing bluff with DocumentDB, a new managed database” and “AWS vs. open source: DocumentDB is the latest battlefront”. It’s no secret that AWS has been wrapping automation and UIs around open source projects for a while and then managing the infrastructure and selling it as a service, and they aren’t the only ones. In October MongoDB changed its license to the Server Side Public License, a license similar to the AGPL license. The SSPL basically requires that anyone who provides the licensed software as a service to others must share and make free to use the software they are using to provide that service. SSPL and AGPL both attempt to prevent companies like AWS from offering a managed service without contributing back to the project. Time will tell if these licenses will work or if open source companies will continue to have difficulty with revenue.

How to Exhibit Leadership as an Individual Contributor
Let’s face it, organizations, no matter how flat, are trees. There are always more people at the bottom. Those people are individual contributors. Just because you are an individual contributor doesn’t mean you can’t exhibit and provide leadership. Sometimes showing leadership gets you promoted, sometimes it gets you recognition, sometimes it gets you nothing. It’s still worth it to try and lead, it may be that extra push that helps get you where you want to go. This article is focused on software development related situations, but it provides some general ways to exhibit leadership.

Decentralizing Social Interactions with ActivityPub
Like it or not social networking in one form or another is here to stay. There is currently an effort underway to allow social networks to interact over a defined protocol. That protocol is called ActivityPub. It’s still in active development but there are already social network initiatives, like Mastodon, that implement it.

New year, new GitHub: Announcing unlimited free private repos and unified Enterprise offering
GitHub has mixed up their pricing model and made private repositories available to everyone. For free account users, there is a restriction on the number of collaborators that can be a part of a private repo. Moving to one of their paid tiers removes that restriction and also provides GitHub Pages, wikis, protected branches, insight graphs and more.