291–300 of 487 posts
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Not sure anyone actually thinks "open source" is a term owned by an organization and the gp didn't say they were restricting Mongo, so I'm not sure if your clarification is necessary. It's like someone claiming certain software doesn't scale. There is no need to clarify that the author doesn't own the word "scalability". Op is speaking for the OSI's opinion on whether it's open source or not.
Then Op should not say in all caps, "IS NOT OPEN SOURCE".
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So, yes, technically, OSI does not own the term open source, and it could be that this license does comply with everything set out in the Open Source Definition ( https://opensource.org/osd ), and that means that, technically, "(the latest version of) MongoDB is not open source" is overstating the case. Except that, as a non-lawyer developer who generally agrees with the Open Source Definition, "under an OSI-approved…
Open source for most people means whether you can see and modify the source code. Not whether OSI gives it some arbitrary stamp of approval.
By which I mean, it's probably fine to think of things that way when you're working in an amateur capacity. If you're working in a non-amateur capacity, thinking about things that way could result in unwittingly exposing yourself to more legal risk than you want.
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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?
How much AWS shares its profits with GCC, qemu, etc? Not at all besides the bare minimum that benefits them.
(And don't misunderstand me, I don't see Mongo as some kind of underdog here, but making big money from software is hard, even if - or exactly because - valuations - and funding - are in the sky.
And AWS is fundamentally a different kind of business than what open source usually is. It has a compounded networks effects / economies of scale effects. And on top of that it has a closed source management layer, but that is largely irrelevant, except for Mongo in this case.)
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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…
The lack of a warranty disclaimer isn't an issue in practice; my readme just says "WTFPL, no warranty". The vague rights grant isn't something I've seen as an issue in analogous situations in case law.
More important, to me, is what WTFPL says about my code: I'm not precious about it, I give it to you, I trust you to go do amazing things with it. It is a very humble licence. It says life is too short to get precious about licence wankery. Plus there's the side-effect that small companies and artisan developers can use it, while behemoths like Google won't. These, in my view, are all to the good.
I don't expect you to share that view, but for these reasons, WTFPL is a "good licence" for me. OpenStreetMap thrived for years with a WTFPL-licensed editor (I wrote/maintained it). No-one died, no-one got sued, and OSM became one of only four worldwide geodatabases. The main reason the current editing software isn't WTFPL (I started it but handed over to more talented developers pretty quickly) is that Intel wanted to use it, went "WTF WTFPL", and asked the new maintainer to change it. He did, but tagged the next release idiot-intel-lawyers. I laughed.
(IANAL, though I have spent way too much time over the past 15 years studying licenses and their applicability across different jurisdictions, again principally in connection with OSM and with its - very successful - licence change.)
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> Is prohibiting commercialisation of my work not in the spirit of open source? Exactly, it's not. > How is my "View and Internal Use License" bad for the open source ecosystem? Whether it's bad is a value judgment I can't answer; it's not open source because it forbids redistribution of the source.
Do you not see any problem with that? Companies who are good at commercialisation gets all the dough for work created by small group of inventors. Is protecting inventors interest not important? Isn't this negatively affecting the ecosystem where there's less motivation for inventors to create open source software in the first place? > it's not open source because it forbids redistribution of the source. This can be…
Open source is mostly about user rights (making things more confusing, a user is sometimes also a developer!). By restricting the users' right to resell or redistribute the source code of your software, you are effectively making it not open source. If you think an open source license is not in your best interest because of these rights, it'd be totally understandable if you decide not to use one.
> This can be solved easily. The "View and Internal Use License" can allow redistribution under the same license (verbatim).
I think you'll find once you add all the necessary provisions for adding users rights, you'll end up with an open source license :) I'd be wary of saying "this can be solved easily": if you follow any kind of debate about software licenses, proprietary or otherwise, you'll see there's nothing easy about them. Any license that is more complex than "do whatever you want with this" is probably not easy.
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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…
Using your analogy, MongoDB is taking all of the free community that is around open source and changing the license after they have a community so they can extract/shakedown money from people. If anyone is abusive, it's people like MongoDB changing the license after they got lots of free contributors adding to mongodb.
I might be reading this wrong, but doesn't this qualify as a "super viral" license in that any code that in any way is part of the stack for hosting Mongo as a Service must be open sourced as well? Granted, a company could buy a commercial license to avoid this but if (for the sake of example) Azure's Mongo hosting was using the open source license would this mean that EVERYTHING that goes into Azure, down to Windows…
Not simply "if you write a new query parser and link it into our db, any SaaS customers must get the modifications so the can continue running the service for themselves if you go under.", but more "if manage to extract value by hosting this software, you must give us a cut or all your code".
I guess there'll be a fork, like with matiadb/mysql?
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 off…
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> Ask the FSF yourself YOU have asserted that the FSF has "wide-reaching political ambitions", therefore it is upon you to provide evidence for this. > has wide-reaching political ambitions I am asking what "political" ambitions does it have, beyond protecting free software. > Don't just take my word for it The thing is, you didn't provide any evidence of the "political ambitions" you speak of and so you're quite rig…
Fine, if you must have it spoon fed to you: https://www.fsf.org/campaigns/
It's not really different in function from https://opensource.org/AdvocateCircle and squarely fails within achieving the goals of free software.
The FSF wants free software to be adopted as widely as possible. The OSI supposedly wants open-source to be as widely adopted as possible, doesn't it?
It's their code so (under current law) they can license it however they want. I see some potential issues, though. > "Inclusion of a covered work in an aggregate does not cause this License to apply to the other parts of the aggregate." I don't see how to reconcile this with the new section 13, which seems to say exactly the opposite. What does this section mean, now that section 13 was completely changed? > it has n…
They want to charge money and have control as a proprietary database. But they want to keep a label "open source" purely for marketing purposes.