111–120 of 487 posts
FWIW: This license is almost certainly incompatible with GPLv3. They struck the portion of section 13 that allowed for such combinations. (You can see it in the redline they published here: https://webassets.mongodb.com/_com_assets/legal/SSPL-compare... )
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 comm…
Isn't this the point of licensing? The author or company building the software requires money in exchange for using their software. The revenue acquired through the license is then use to pay for additional development. Revenue sharing seems to imply some kindness / goodwill agreement.
Paying for a license won’t get you customers but paying for referrals will
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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…
This is a bad analogy for software, since software is not a finite resource. Anyone can make a near infinite number of copies.
Don't blame 3rd parties when you realized that an open source license is the wrong license for your product.
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> 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…
> I feel like many people deciding to use an open source license for their project never consider the consequences of such choice I might say instead that the norms of open source software development -- attribution, collaboration, good faith -- are so baked in to small, high-trust communities that they might seem as though they'll be obvious to everyone. And then your software makes it way to the public and you real…
And I say this as someone who has released all of his software within the past decade using either GPLv3 or APGL, for exactly this reason.
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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 thi…
Did the MongoDB pay for their Linux distros? GCC? Git? How much are they paying to the FOSS projects they used to build their software for sale?
(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…
When they fail to give back by dodging taxes, paying minimum wages, spying on people, cornering markets, competing against FLOSS project/orgs they are breaking good faith relations (and the spirit of law)
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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…
Please do, to the extent their experiences relate to informal licenses.
> some cloud providers — especially in Asia Alibaba & Tencent have been offering managed MongoDB offerings for a while but MongoDB, Inc. has historically not made any major investment in its own managed offering (Atlas) for that market. This license shift is aimed squarely at AWS, who is rumored to be ready to announce/release their own MongoDB-compatible service at AWS re:Invent next month.
MongoDB submitted this new license for approval by OSI at the same time that they announced that they'd relicensed all of their code. We wish they'd started the process prior to the announcement, but what's done is done. The result, however, is that at this moment, MongoDB is under a non-approved license and therefore IS NOT OPEN SOURCE.
As the license review process only started this morning, there's no way to estimate how long the process will take. There also is no guarantee that the license will be found to obey the Open Source Definition, and therefore no guarantee that it will be approved.
Hopefully this will all be resolved soon, but there are far too many question marks around this license (and therefore also around any software using it) right now. It's probably best to limit your legal risk by not upgrading to an SSPL-licensed MongoDB at this point. The previous AGPL-licensed version should always be available.