The prohibition on providing the software as a service appears to conflict with, or at least be trivially bypassed by, section 9 which states that to run the software you don't have to accept the terms of the license. Section 9 conforms with the law as written: running the software, and making the copies needed to run it, are explicitly not an infringement of copyright (USC Title 17 section 117(a)(1) [cornell.edu]). If I don't have to accept the license to do something, I'm not bound by it's terms merely because I do that something.
MongoDB switches up its open source license
361–370 of 487 posts
Re: MongoDB switches up its open source license
#362Earlier quoted context omitted.
You sound like you're arguing just to argue. Do you have a valid point? Their OSD is what defines open source. You didn't define it. It wasn't defined at some party or demo-conf. It was defined by the OSI - they defined Open Source Software. Arguing otherwise shows a serious lack of OSS knowledge.
Nope. I just dislike it when someone tries to claim control over a simple English words. They don't have a trademark on open source so they don't get the right to go around saying what is / isn't open source.
They made up the term and their definition is what most people associate with "open source". This is not a legal right, it's just "let's not redefine words because we don't like their common meaning".
Re: MongoDB switches up its open source license
#363Earlier quoted context omitted.
Your opinion isn't the only one out there. I recognize the OSI as the authority on the term open source. On a more practical level: who do you consider be the authority? If the answer is 'nobody' (except yourself) then that makes the term essentially meaningless because there is no standardization, which means that one should stop using that term.
The authority on word definitions is a dictionary, so that we don't have to argue like that. This definition seems suitable: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/open-source
Noah Webster did use a strongly prescriptive approach when he wrote his dictionary. His decision to use alternate or simplified spellings of some words is still seen today as the differences between American English and British English. Linguistic prescription - the idea that there is a single "correct" language and other uses of language are somehow inferior or improper - was used to intentionally to give American English it's own identity.
Fortunately, most modern dictionaries recognize that languages evolve, using a descriptive approach, updating definitions when needed to reflect how words are actually used.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dictionary#Prescriptive_vs._de...
Re: MongoDB switches up its open source license
#364Earlier quoted context omitted.
But we do need a gatekeeper - that's where you're wrong. Without it, we don't get a fair review of licenses by people most adept at understanding what Open Source is. Without it, we will go back to the wild west of licensing where we have hundreds of OSS licenses that each have their own little clauses and are written by developers, not lawyers, so they don't really hold up in court. Open Source is for corporations t…
> But we do need a gatekeeper Having observed this area for 18 years now, I'll say that gatekeeper (a party which has unwaveringly observed and stuck to delivering the principles of software freedom) is the Free Software Foundation. This is the only reason why users gravitate to "open source" - not its sexy name, but the freedoms such software provides when a user wants to use/apply it. Back in the day, the founding…
For all his craziness, you've got to admire Stallman for his unwavering conviction of his version of what free software should be and allow. I don't know whether he'd be frothing at the mouth, or quietly thinking "I told you so..." about the current antics at Redis and Mongo...
Re: MongoDB switches up its open source license
#365Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The result, however, is that at this moment, MongoDB is under a non-approved license and therefore IS NOT OPEN SOURCE. Perhaps you meant to say "is not OSI Certified", because the OSI don't appear to have a right to restrict use of the phrase "open source". See what's on your own website: https://opensource.org/pressreleases/certified-open-source.p... On the other comments in this thread, even though MongoDB have "…
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…
Between Cygnus/Red Hat and Mozilla, I've worked for open-source-based companies for 7 years of my career, and never once heard or believed "open source" in lowercase to mean "OSI-approved."
I appreciate what OSI does, and do value an OSI review and endorsement, but you're seriously reaching here and trying to double-down on it.
Edit:
To be clear, I think the OSD captures what open source is, but OP tried to say "We haven't reviewed it, so it's not open source," not "We haven't reviewed it, so WE don't know it's still open source." Whether or not and when OSI gets around to reviewing something has zero bearing on whether something meets the OSD, even if we are going to assume that's the de facto definition.
I find the idea the VP thinks we need to wait on them to deliver their judgment from on high to be, frankly, offensive. OSI didn't successfully get the trademark on "open source" for a reason, and I can read a license myself.
Re: MongoDB switches up its open source license
#366Earlier quoted context omitted.
> MongoDB is under a non-approved license and therefore IS NOT OPEN SOURCE. It might still be open source. It's accurate to say it's not under an OSI approved open source licence, but that's not exactly the same thing.
The OSI is the founder and DEFINER of the term "open source" so saying that it's open source without an OSI approved license is like saying your app's an approved Android app without it first being reviewed. Get it?? Open Source is a term coined by the OSI.
Ok so they coined it but if they wanted to police who used the term they should have trademarked it and sued everyone who used it without their approval. Of course they wouldn't get very far with that strategy, but then they shouldn't expect to eat that cake.
Re: MongoDB switches up its open source license
#367(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…
There's no issue here. The whole point of OSS is that anyone can use it. Cloud vendors are providing managed services because that's what their customers demand, and the value isn't in the software itself but the managed part of it all.
Any other company (like Compose) can do the same thing and there are several hundred vendors offering various options. MongoDB Atlas is entirely this, and seems to be doing well by leveraging their own expertise and moving faster than the others.
If MongoDB now wants to change the license then they're free to do so, but they'll face the consequences of becoming more proprietary with their offering. It may help or it may hurt, but there's not some big universal argument to be made. If you don't want to make and give away free stuff, then don't. The rest of the world will still manage just fine.
Re: MongoDB switches up its open source license
#368Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The OSI owns the definition No, OSI doesn't own the definition and doesn't get to define open source. Some people agree with that definition, some don't. Nobody has to though. You can't really own what other people think, you can only try to agree on some definition during interaction. No need to pretend there is some universal truth that they just don't know about. It's an agreement, not truth. And OSI might becom…
Yes, they do! They are the ones that put together the OSD ( https://opensource.org/osd ) which they derived from the DGSL. No one else has defined open source, not even Richard M. Stallman. His definition is for "Free Software", not "Open Source". So when it comes to who owns the definition, the definitive answer is the OSI. Anything else is just subjective opinions. You must not work. Because businesses that do REAL…
I think what I'm seeing over and over in this thread is people talking past each other because the grandparent shouldn't have assumed we were all working in the same context.
I agree, in the legal context of business decisions, OSI has a very specific claim to the term 'open source' and declaring that mongoDB "IS NOT OPEN SOURCE" is a warning directed towards people making business judgements around legal risk.
To everyone else, we use the term 'open source' because we heard someone else say it, and when we write software we say 'oh it will be open source' without getting into the nitty gritty of what license it will use and whether that's OSI approved.
Re: MongoDB switches up its open source license
#369Earlier quoted context omitted.
Open source is a term of art with an agreed upon definition, and it has been for 20 years which, not-so-coincidentally, is also when the Open Source Initiative was founded. The fact that you've never heard of OSI means we've been doing our job well enough that you've never needed to know about it. The fact that you've never heard of OSI does NOT mean that it's not legitimate, and frankly, that kind of rhetoric is jus…
If this is held true and everyone agrees it, all this conversation/wider thread has served to show is that the term has reached 'genericization'. The OSI can claim/define what is wishes to but in practice it has lost authorship of the 'open source' definition. Just like Google/Xerox/Kleenex/Taser/Bubble Wrap/Dumpster/Escalator/thermos/Chapstick/Frisbee/Photoshop et al.
That's exactly the point I was trying to make.
Re: MongoDB switches up its open source license
#370Earlier quoted context omitted.
>> who do you consider be the authority? That would be Richard Matthew Stallman, the proverbial OG in this entire field.
ESR and O Reilly are the OGs for OSS, though they certainly owe a debt to RMS
Neither invented the term, they just marketed it, because it directly benefitted them.
Christine Peterson of the Foresight Institute is the "OG" for the term "open source" as applied to software.