DuckDB outgrows its nest
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Amazon is acquiring Duck Labs, the company behind DuckDB, keeping it as a wholly-owned subsidiary with the DuckDB Foundation retaining control over the IP and license, which will stay permissively open. MotherDuck's CEO reflects on four years of partnership with DuckDB's creators, announces MotherDuck now offers enterprise support (previously avoided to not compete with Duck Labs), and welcomes eventual competition from an Amazon-built DuckDB cloud service, drawing parallels to the Snowflake/BigQuery/Redshift era.
Questions this post answers
Did Amazon acquire the company behind DuckDB?
Yes, Amazon acquired Duck Labs, the company founded by Hannes Mühleisen and Mark Raasveldt that develops DuckDB. Duck Labs will remain a wholly-owned subsidiary with its organization intact, continuing to work in open source. The DuckDB Foundation retains iron-clad control over the DuckDB intellectual property, and the DuckDB license will stay permissively open. daily.dev helps developers track how ownership changes like this affect open-source database licensing and roadmaps.
Is MotherDuck still independent after the DuckDB Amazon acquisition?
Yes, MotherDuck remains a separate company and continues its four-year partnership with Duck Labs engineers to improve DuckDB. With the acquisition, MotherDuck now offers enterprise support for production DuckDB deployments, something it previously avoided to not compete with Duck Labs' business model; that restriction has been lifted with Hannes and Mark's blessing. Teams choosing between DuckDB service providers can follow these shifts on daily.dev before committing.
Will Amazon build its own DuckDB-based cloud data warehouse service?
It is likely, though not yet released. MotherDuck's CEO expects Amazon will eventually launch a DuckDB-based service, similar to how Redshift competed with Snowflake and BigQuery without slowing Snowflake's growth even on AWS, and frames this as healthy competition that benefits users of DuckDB-based products. daily.dev keeps engineers weighing cloud data warehouse options informed as the DuckDB competitive landscape evolves.