MongoDB switches up its open source license • Hacker News Board

Re: MongoDB switches up its open source license

#61

Post by fabianhjr » Tue, Oct 16, 2018, 3:21 PM UTC

ReverseCold wrote: post #8

I used to like permissive (OSI) licenses a lot more than restrictive licenses, but now I like copyleft better (for my own projects) because… 1. You’re still helping education, nonprofits, and individuals benefit from your work. 2. It’s still open source, so people will still be able to contribute and use your work in their own projects. 3. Companies that want to use your code to make money can do so, but only if they…

About:

> I'm consider something more radical like a YUMMY license (you make money, I make money)

There are some projects to create such a license like License Zero

https://licensezero.com/licenses

and there is some discussion on the P2P Foundation:

https://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/Copyfarleft

> It is exactly the same as (CC) non-commercial, except that commons-based commercial use //is// allowed.

Re: MongoDB switches up its open source license

#62

Post by kbumsik » Tue, Oct 16, 2018, 3:22 PM UTC

mrkurt wrote: post #47

kbumsik wrote: post #46

I personally see why MongoDB switches its license and clarify their original intention of using AGPL. I even didn't know it was AGPL until now (I'm not MongoDB user). Because so many people seem to use it as if it is Apache License or something free of charge. I haven't see any warnings on AGPL and its implications in MongoDB tutorials on the internet.

The drivers are all permissive OSS licenses. It's on purpose, they never wanted to own applications that are built on top of MongoDB, but they never wanted to give away the server bit either.

I meant people seem to install the server too, thinking that the server itself it free. Most of MongoDB tutorials on the internet starts with "how to install locally" without mentioning nothing about the license.

Re: MongoDB switches up its open source license

#63

Post by greenshackle2 » Tue, Oct 16, 2018, 3:22 PM UTC

Uehreka wrote: post #5

reacharavindh wrote: post #2

At the outset, it sounds simple that MongoDB inc thinks why should some 3rd party cloud provider (AWS, GCP, DO and the like) be allowed to run MongoDB as a service and make money while MongoDB contributes the biggest part of the open source project that is MongoDB. But, it feels like yet another fallacy. What really is an open source project then? Say some developer X contributes to a project like MongoDB his/her ope…

IANAL, but I believe in this case a maintainer can just fork MongoDB from right before they changed the license, then new contributors can just contribute to that forked repo, creating an off brand “Non-goDB” that will get a lot of the updates that people want. This would fracture the development of the project and would be bad for everyone, but at least the open source community wouldn’t completely lose the project.

IANAL either but just to be pedantic, in theory I don't see what stops them from no longer distributing old versions under AGPLv3. Having distributed it at one point under GPL doesn't force them to continue doing so forever.

Of course that would be pointless as anyone who forked before the license change could continue re-distributing under AGPLv3.

Re: MongoDB switches up its open source license

#64

Post by super3 » Tue, Oct 16, 2018, 3:23 PM UTC

What really should happen is that the large cloud companies (really just Google, Amazon, and Azure) should be providing a portion of the revenue generated to the open source projects. The open source companies would make more features and drive more usage. Everybody wins. It makes no sense that the large cloud providers make billions off OSS, and don't give something more sustainable back. Classic tragedy of the commons.

Disclaimer: My company Storj is building a distributed Amazon S3 competitor and we are actually partnered with MongoDB. We share revenue with MongoDB for any customers they bring us.

Re: MongoDB switches up its open source license

#65

Post by gigatexal » Tue, Oct 16, 2018, 3:24 PM UTC

oropolo wrote: post #41

mrkurt wrote: post #33

(Context: I worked on Compose/MongoHQ for a very long time. We were the first to monetize MongoDB) I'm sure people will get riled up about this, but it makes sense. Building a business on an OSS database in a world of behemoth cloud providers is really hard. It's clear Google and Amazon (and maybe even Azure) are comfy taking OSS work, doing a ton of proprietary development on it, and leaving the companies who did al…

> It's clear Google and Amazon (and maybe even Azure) are comfy taking OSS work, doing a ton of proprietary development on it, and leaving the companies who did all the groundwork flailing in the wind. Have you seen the degree of investment Microsoft has made lately in Open Source? It's an upside-down world where Microsoft if a bigger champion -- and funder -- of open source than a company like Google which was built…

But the companies that shepherd and develop the open source software and let the community use it for free has to be supported somehow. So unless the cloud companies want to fund these companies and thereby fund the developers of the open source software directly then these kinds of licenses make sense.

Re: MongoDB switches up its open source license

#66

Post by mbreese » Tue, Oct 16, 2018, 3:25 PM UTC

zzzcpan wrote: post #26

reacharavindh wrote: post #2

At the outset, it sounds simple that MongoDB inc thinks why should some 3rd party cloud provider (AWS, GCP, DO and the like) be allowed to run MongoDB as a service and make money while MongoDB contributes the biggest part of the open source project that is MongoDB. But, it feels like yet another fallacy. What really is an open source project then? Say some developer X contributes to a project like MongoDB his/her ope…

But you can still offer it as a service, just as long as you opensource your infrastructure. The only thing it prevents you is profiting from lock-in of your services without sharing those profits with MongoDB. Very much in the spirit of open source.

Yeah, but how is that really supposed to work? I can see why MongoDB would want to do this, but how on earth is this really supposed to be implemented? Where do you draw the line? What I suspect is that you'll end up with a bunch of shell scripts for creating MongoDB instances...

Re: MongoDB switches up its open source license

#67

Post by christkv » Tue, Oct 16, 2018, 3:26 PM UTC

kstrauser wrote: post #55

christkv wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can go after their western subsidiaries and thus keep them out of western markets

How does this change make that any easier. I’m asking genuinely.

I guess they could get injunctions to shut them down in places like the eu and us (basically blocking them, or getting fines).

I've no idea if this is easy or not but it could be used as a negotiation tactic (I'm guessing here) to negotiate a license deal.

Re: MongoDB switches up its open source license

#68

Post by jchw » Tue, Oct 16, 2018, 3:27 PM UTC

People weren't "testing the boundaries" of AGPL. You need to know nearly nothing about AGPL to understand this. The bottom line is, AGPL merely requires you to publish your modifications. But if cloud providers are offering essentially a vanilla MongoDB instance, there is no reason they are compelled to buy a commercial license.

Still, I wonder where MongoDB actually wants the boundary drawn. Anyone that tries to offer the MongoDB protocol as a service using the official code? Or is it if I provide a database interface to a MongoDB instance? Or is it only if the actual MongoDB interface from the MongoDB server is provided? I haven't read their new license but I have a strong feeling that it won't be 100% clear yet.

Re: MongoDB switches up its open source license

#69

Post by mbreese » Tue, Oct 16, 2018, 3:29 PM UTC

antirez wrote: post #52

kstrauser wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is those going to affect China? If the old enforcement methods didn’t work with the previous sane-ish license, they certainly won’t work any better with the new monstrosity.

Now you don't have to pretend that they changed something without having any way to prove it. Now if the orchestration software is not open source, they can't use it.

They could just claim that their orchestration software is open-source (potentially w/o stating what it is), or just publish a stub set of scripts that plausibly work but that aren't actually used under the hood. I'm not sure this really makes things all that much clearer.

Re: MongoDB switches up its open source license

#70

Post by super3 » Tue, Oct 16, 2018, 3:30 PM UTC

oropolo wrote: post #41

mrkurt wrote: post #33

(Context: I worked on Compose/MongoHQ for a very long time. We were the first to monetize MongoDB) I'm sure people will get riled up about this, but it makes sense. Building a business on an OSS database in a world of behemoth cloud providers is really hard. It's clear Google and Amazon (and maybe even Azure) are comfy taking OSS work, doing a ton of proprietary development on it, and leaving the companies who did al…

> It's clear Google and Amazon (and maybe even Azure) are comfy taking OSS work, doing a ton of proprietary development on it, and leaving the companies who did all the groundwork flailing in the wind. Have you seen the degree of investment Microsoft has made lately in Open Source? It's an upside-down world where Microsoft if a bigger champion -- and funder -- of open source than a company like Google which was built…

The total cloud market is around $180B. 90% are on running Linux, and 2/3 are running on OSS. If it is not in the billions its not enough.