HN user
Making it harder to switch is by definition anti-competitive
Every provider out there optimizes the integration between its own services and makes sure the products in its ecosystem work nicely together. Meanwhile they cannot account for all other usages outside their systems. That's far from "making it harder to switch".
Even without the egress fees, I'd prefer running software from 3rd party providers on the same cloud my that product also uses, since a) latency and b) integration with other services (VPC, for example).
Can someone please explain how it is possible to license a database of such sort in the first place? Pretty much all file types have some documentation on how to identify them by reading specific bytes, it's not like the folks from freedesktop invented those methods. On top of that, having the DB licensed under GPL would mean that every line of it is also under GPL, thus forcing the same GPL to all libraries out there that do even a simple PNG check using a magical byte check?
I'm really curious to understand how it this licensing works.