AWS acquired DuckLabs, the Amsterdam company behind the DuckDB analytics database, closing August 31, 2026, but DuckDB itself stays free, MIT-licensed, and governed by the independent nonprofit DuckDB Foundation rather than Amazon.
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Transcript
AWS just acquired DuckLabs, the company behind DuckDB, the popular embedded database for fast local analytics. But here's what makes this deal different. AWS is not acquiring DuckDB itself. The code, the trademarks, the technical direction, all of it stays with the independent, nonprofit DuckDB Foundation, under the same MIT license as before. DuckDB's creators join AWS, but the project they built doesn't become AWS's property. That structure matters because of what happened before. Elasticsearch, Redis, Terraform: all relicensed away from fully open terms after a single company controlled both the code and the team. AWS structurally can't do that here. Whether that independence holds in practice is the thing worth watching.