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MongoDB switches up its open source license

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Re: MongoDB switches up its open source license

#71

Post by kstrauser »

christkv wrote: post #67
kstrauser wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

But what I wonder is why it would be any more illegal to violate this license than the perfectly normal old one? And if it’s not, then why bother?

Re: MongoDB switches up its open source license

#72

Post by DannyBee »

mrkurt wrote: post #60
DannyBee wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is your definition of "abuse"? This feels a lot like when i hear about "GPL" abuse when it was specifically not designed for what people think is abuse (and that's not my view but stallman's). Similarly, AGPL was not designed to require every piece of software around a piece of AGPL software to be open sourced. Deliberately so. Not doing so is not "abuse". You may have different goals, and that's actually fine!…

Abuse is taking all the free candy at a doctor's office. It might just violate a norm without breaking a law, but it's still abuse. It's situational, but if you define abuse as "breaking a contract or law" we're not going to agree on anything about this. MongoDB has _always_ wanted to make money when other people make money reselling their work. The AGPL doesn't really do what they needed, but their intent has been c…

Let's be real concrete here with no analogies: I asked you to define what you see as abuse?

Give me concrete examples.

I explicitly pointed out to you a social norm, not a violation of contract. I did not define it as breaking a contract or law. I defined it in terms of the social norm that was set by the creator of the license, or the "spirit" of the license.

I want to understand what you see as "violation of that spirit", not the legal definition. As mentioned, most definitions i've seen here are explicitly not what the creator of the license intended (again, not what they wrote down, but what they intended). It's hard to see something that doesn't violate the spirit of the license as abuse.

For example, i often hear about "not contributing back" to GPL projects. RMS explicitly was okay with "not contributing back" in the broader sense, as long as they released their source code. He had no expectation he would get anything other than a pile of source that he would have to deal with. He just wanted to be able to hack it, so as long as it had the right stuff, he didn't expect others to care. He thought it would be nice for sure, but it's not "abuse".

(A great concrete example of abuse is usually binary kernel blobs that have deliberate shim interfaces. This clearly violates the spirit of the license even if the license says it may be okay.)

So far i haven't seen what you have defined as abuse especially by "large companies".

Additionally, I pointed out to you the notion that large corporations are the ones doing the abusing is wrong under almost all definitions of abuse, spirit, legal, aspirational, you name it.

Re: MongoDB switches up its open source license

#73

Post by babuskov »

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…

> exploit permissive licenses to the max

I feel like many people deciding to use an open source license for their project never consider the consequences of such choice. They use OSS because it's "cool" or they hope to get some free work done for them. If you pick an open source license and someone uses your code to build something else within the license boundaries, that is not a Bad Thing(tm).

I have released many open source projects under MIT and GPL licenses and I have no problem with anyone repackaging it however they please, as long as they respect the license terms.

On the other hand, when I pick an OSS software to build upon, I pick it exactly because of the license and plan to use the license to the extent it is allowed. If the license doesn't look like a good fit, I use something else or write my own code.

I don't feel like Google/Amazon/etc. owe anything to anyone just because they made it and now have a lot of money.

Re: MongoDB switches up its open source license

#74

Post by DannyBee »

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…

"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 all the groundwork flailing in the wind. "

This is simply not true in any meaningful way. Please cite real data. It's very hard to disagree with handwaving like this.

Both Google's official policy (which is super clear about this: https://opensource.google.com/docs/), and practice (releasing and working on tens of thousands of open source projects) say otherwise.

I would love to see the data that goes with this claim.

Re: MongoDB switches up its open source license

#75

Post by christkv »

kstrauser wrote: post #71
christkv wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

But what I wonder is why it would be any more illegal to violate this license than the perfectly normal old one? And if it’s not, then why bother?

I'm not a lawyer but my understanding is that the AGPL does not stop you from offering it as a service as it does not explicitly say you need to contribute back anything that is not direct modifications to the server source code. But that's just how I read it.

Re: MongoDB switches up its open source license

#76

Post by cdibona »

mrkurt wrote: post #60
DannyBee wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is your definition of "abuse"? This feels a lot like when i hear about "GPL" abuse when it was specifically not designed for what people think is abuse (and that's not my view but stallman's). Similarly, AGPL was not designed to require every piece of software around a piece of AGPL software to be open sourced. Deliberately so. Not doing so is not "abuse". You may have different goals, and that's actually fine!…

Abuse is taking all the free candy at a doctor's office. It might just violate a norm without breaking a law, but it's still abuse. It's situational, but if you define abuse as "breaking a contract or law" we're not going to agree on anything about this. MongoDB has _always_ wanted to make money when other people make money reselling their work. The AGPL doesn't really do what they needed, but their intent has been c…

Who are you to decide what is the norm being violated? What I mean by that was the entire point of open source and free software licensing is to codify the 'norms' that the authors found important.

Companies like Google, MS, Amazon are not violating norms but complying with them. When companies like MongoDB abandon these licenses its because they're incompatible with their business model.

Open Source is fine for them while they're making a market and developing a programmer user base, becoming popular with people who will not bother with a new proprietary database, mind you, but once they're 'popular' and need to increase revenue, the license gets replaced with a familiar , proprietary, one.

Re: MongoDB switches up its open source license

#77

Post by DannyBee »

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…

Here, i'll make a provocative statement:

Google has released roughly every meaningful patch it has made to the open source software it was built on[1].

As for funding, that's definitely not true by the numbers last i looked (and definitely was not true in the past).

Without concrete disagreements, this is just handwaving. So if you make some, i'm happy to argue with real data.

[1] The only cases i can think of that this isn't true is when the Googler who worked on it left before they got a chance to do that (and nobody has picked it up since)

Re: MongoDB switches up its open source license

#78

Post by tannhaeuser »

k__ wrote: post #4
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…

I had the feeling that AWS and Azure are pushing their own NoSQL solutions and don't care much about MongoDB.

Azure offers Cosmos DB advertised as a drop-in for MongoDB. I'm guessing Cosmos is Mongo in disguise, though I don't know if it really is, and/or whether MS has made a deal with Mongo or just think they can use the AGPL version.

For the record: I'm not a big fan of Mongo (the DB) but I think MongoDB, Inc. raises a valid point wrt. developers doing all the hard work including community building and a million other things, while "cloud providers" get all the money. This isn't sustainable, and we need a license which more clearly says "if you make money with it, you need to give us some", rather than using the bare AGPL license without further qualifications in the hope AGPL's "freedom" aspirations have the indirect effect of forcing commercial users and/or resellers to pay.

Re: MongoDB switches up its open source license

#79

Post by [deleted] »

DannyBee wrote: post #45
Doctor_Fegg wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really like WTFPL as a permissive licence in these cases. Small developers and companies without layers of lawyers will read the licence, see that it says "do what the ---- you want", and use your code accordingly. Big companies with layers of lawyers will read the licence, blanch in terror, and either refuse to use the software, or contact you for alternative terms. Case in point: Google forbids use of the WTFPL.…

So i'm the one who forbid WTFPL at Google, and we forbid it mainly because it's bad for developers, believe it or not. We go over it in new googler training (and our reasoning is on the Google open source policy site we publish: https://opensource.google.com/docs/thirdparty/licenses/#wtfp... ) You are welcome to not (but if you go and look, it's completely consistent with my viewpoints and history in OSS so ...). I w…

[deleted]

Re: MongoDB switches up its open source license

#80

Post by specialp »

DannyBee wrote: post #29
vslira wrote: post #18

I'm not an expert in licenses, could someone weight in and explain how the AGPLv3 was being abused? Did the mentioned companies follow the spirit of the license and were getting away with something the company didn't like or were they just improperly distributing the software, regardless of licensing terms? Also: "So while the SSPL isn’t all that different from the GNU GPLv3,(...) [it] explicitly states that anybody…

Speaking as a lawyer: There was no abuse, there was only mongo not being able to make money in all cases they wanted to. That's what they see as abuse. It isn't. While they complain of bad actors, bad actors always act bad. This will not disincentivize them (they are also often in a lot of interesting jurisdictions that would make it hard anyway). Instead, this is really about making it completely unpalatable for nor…

> While they complain of bad actors, bad actors always act bad. This will not disincentivize them (they are also often in a lot of interesting jurisdictions that would make it hard anyway).

Yes this is not going to stop the Asian cloud providers they talk about. It is truly aimed at AWS et al. If they came out and said that it would not sound as nice. Mongo just made a big move in the cloud space by buying mLab. They are looking to contain the competition.

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