AWS Acquires DuckLabs: DuckDB Stays Open

DuckLabs — the Amsterdam-based collective developing the popular embeddable analytical DBMS DuckDB — has announced that it is moving under the wing of Amazon Web Services. The deal is expected to close in early September. The project's founders, Mark Raasveldt and Hannes Mühleisen, stress that the team will stay together in Amsterdam and continue working on DuckDB, DuckLake, Quack and the related ecosystem.

The key promise is that openness will be preserved. DuckDB and the other components of the “Duck Stack” will remain free and open under the MIT license, and they will still be curated by the nonprofit DuckDB Foundation, which owns the rights to the code.

Why AWS

Five years ago, when DuckDB was just gaining momentum, the founders deliberately turned down venture money and built the company with their own funds, wholly owned by the team. This let them put technology above commerce. The collective grew to more than thirty people, and the DBMS itself now sees over a million downloads a day.

The chosen model, however, revealed a ceiling. The founders feared that sooner or later DuckDB's growth would outpace their ability to support it, and that the small company would turn into a “bottleneck” for the whole project and the business built around it. Yet building up sales, support and operations departments would mean being pulled away from engineering work and the community — the very things that made DuckDB a success.

DuckLabs and AWS have already been collaborating for more than a year, and that experience, according to the founders, gave them confidence. Together they intend to make the “duck stack” the foundation of a new generation of data services — so that millions of users rely on it, sometimes without even realizing it. AWS, for its part, has committed to supporting the development of DuckDB and the community over the long term.

What Will Change

The founders openly acknowledge that an announcement like this raises legitimate questions for the community. Their answer: openness will remain central. At the same time, some things will actually expand. The DuckDB Foundation will gain a technical advisory board, where prominent members of the community will be able to influence the project's direction. In addition, the developers plan to open up the extensions stack — so that DuckDB can run extensions signed by other companies and authors.

The news was welcomed by the leaders of adjacent projects. MotherDuck's head Jordan Tigani believes that Amazon's involvement will add momentum to DuckDB and strengthen the ecosystem, while Fivetran CEO George Fraser calls Amazon the “perfect home” for DuckLabs. On the AWS side, the deal is overseen by distinguished engineer and vice president Andy Warfield, who called the DuckLabs team one of the most technically deep and humble teams he has ever worked with.

Source: Hacker News