Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

MongoDB switches up its open source license

techcrunch.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

431–440 of 487 posts

Re: MongoDB switches up its open source license

#431

Post by eitally »

jammygit wrote: post #427
bigiain wrote: post #364

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

I wonder what it would take for the community to fork a major project in response to a license update by the original company that 'owns' it

It happened with OpenOffice --> LibreOffice when Oracle acquired Sun.

Re: MongoDB switches up its open source license

#432

Post by cyphar »

candeira wrote: post #410
cyphar wrote: post #402

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Huh, how on earth did that get approved. It violates Section 6 of the definition: "No Discrimination Against Fields of Endeavor" (which specifically has the example of discrimination by disallowing software use within a business). Personally I never liked the OSI's definition of "open source", and the FSF definition of free software has always felt (for me) to be far more fundamental.

If you never liked the OSI's definition of "open source", what do you think about the Debian Free Software Guidelines? About the discrimination of fields of endeavour, please read the sibling comment to yours. I think you and the grandparent have both misunderstood the license.

I went and re-read Section 17 (the only section that is different from the OSLv3) and yeah it looks like tl;dr legal misrepresents what the license requires. Effectively, it requires that if you redistribute it and want to do so under the NP-OSLv3 you must make a declaration that you're a non-profit and so on -- otherwise you must distribute it under the OSLv3 and clearly state this is the case. (I don't really see the benefit of such a license, but each to their own.)

Looks like I was wrong. Regarding the DFSG, I think it was necessary (according to Bruce Parens it was the DFSG which convinced Stallman to distribute his four freedoms definition more widely). I think the DFSG is a decent set of guidelines that help avoid legal trouble for Debian by having clear requirements, but I don't think it's a good definition for a movement's primary purpose. In many ways the DFSG and OSD can be seen as re-statements of the four freedoms but without any strong justification for why these particular conditions are necessary for a license to be good -- the four freedoms can be explained by explaining how each freedom is necessary to ensure that users have control over their computers.

For an example of why having strong fundamentals is important, the OSD doesn't really have a stance on DRM -- while the free software definition clearly does (even though it predates any modern concepts of DRM).

Re: MongoDB switches up its open source license

#433

Post by bkuhn »

I posted my response on a blog post at: https://sfconservancy.org/blog/2018/oct/16/mongodb-copyleft-...

TL;DR: while vmbrasseur of OSI does say "what's done is done" in comments here, I think the OSI shouldn't accept the proposal as submitted, and should demand that licenses submitted them to have gone through a prior public drafting process. This is particularly important for licenses whose stated goal is to make fundamental changes to how copyleft works. GPLv3 and (even better) copyleft-next made this the standard of how new license drafts are done, and we should follow that standard.

Re: MongoDB switches up its open source license

#434

Post by kemitchell »

theclaw wrote: post #407
vmbrasseur wrote: post #120

Vice President of the Open Source Initiative here. 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…

I certainly learned some things today. I didn’t realise ‘open source’ had such a specific meaning, and I understand why it’s useful to establish the definition so there is no ambiguity. Reading the replies to this thread is like watching hippies fight over the definition of free love. Open source doesn’t mean anything unless we all agree on one definition, and while idealistic developers might reject the idea of cent…

The Open Source Definition is plenty ambiguous. It's not even internally consistent. Read the introduction, which sets us up for rules about license terms, and then criterion 2, which talks about source availability. What LICENSE says for the binary doesn't guarantee the distributor source.

That doesn't mean OSD was bunk or busted. It means we've preserved it for historical relevance, not operative function. Else we'd've revised a great deal more in 20 years.

Instead, in discussion of new license submissions, we routinely see readings of OSD criteria that would exclude the very set of contemporaneous, popular licenses the original Debian Free Software Definition was meant to generalize. For example, that criterion 6 prohibits discrimination against proprietary development as a field of endeavor. OSD isn't a consensus, exactly because it invites so many such readings. There's consensus only insofar as interest groups agree to disagree in OSD terms, as a framework. Some don't. Notably FSF, with its own "definition".

The trouble with open source is that it's a movement, a community idea, not an entry in any formal lexicon, not a fixed point. License terms are only incidental to that movement, that community idea. A zeitgeist and a name. And there's nothing particularly legal about OSD criteria, apart from the expectation they'll be implemented in the legal medium of public license terms. Legal's no magic font of rigor here.

As I'm led to believe, "Free Love" never suffered such discipline as OSI claims now. Free Love was something people were into, stood for, practiced. There was never any organization proffering a definition of Free Love as definitive, official in some sense, and telling folks their particular love didn't count, wasn't free enough. "Free Love" meant something because of how it was used and understood, variously, not how it was defined. It was always contested, and contestable.

Pretending that the OSD, or more accurately OSI approval, represents consensus for new proposals clearly benefits only those who like the particular status quo that a select subset wish to preserve by clout right now. Circa 2002, OSI was approving plenty of licenses in the vein of Mongo's new terms, to welcome smaller businesses challenging more powerful incumbents on behalf of the open approach. Notably RPL and QFPL and Watcom. The permissive-industrial complex hastens to elide or deprecate those approvals now. Even though today very arguably wasn't reachable without accepting strong reciprocal licenses for dual licensors, as a waystation.

Re: MongoDB switches up its open source license

#435

Post by vmbrasseur »

bkuhn wrote: post #433

I posted my response on a blog post at: https://sfconservancy.org/blog/2018/oct/16/mongodb-copyleft-... TL;DR: while vmbrasseur of OSI does say "what's done is done" in comments here, I think the OSI shouldn't accept the proposal as submitted, and should demand that licenses submitted them to have gone through a prior public drafting process. This is particularly important for licenses whose stated goal is to make fu…

My friend, the "what's done is done" was purely in reference to the fact that the license was submitted for approval belatedly (IMO). My statement in no way implied whether the license itself would be approved as it stands.

Now that the license has been submitted, folks can now analyse and discuss it, openly. Any decision on the license will spring from those discussions and the related actions (should any be needed) that MongoDB takes based on the feedback they receive.

The proper place for that feedback is on the discussion thread on the review mailing list. Statements on blogs and comments on Hacker News are good for helping to frame that feedback, but aren't well placed to be included in a cohesive conversation.

Re: MongoDB switches up its open source license

#436

Post by candeira »

cyphar wrote: post #432
candeira wrote: post #410

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you never liked the OSI's definition of "open source", what do you think about the Debian Free Software Guidelines? About the discrimination of fields of endeavour, please read the sibling comment to yours. I think you and the grandparent have both misunderstood the license.

I went and re-read Section 17 (the only section that is different from the OSLv3) and yeah it looks like tl;dr legal misrepresents what the license requires. Effectively, it requires that if you redistribute it and want to do so under the NP-OSLv3 you must make a declaration that you're a non-profit and so on -- otherwise you must distribute it under the OSLv3 and clearly state this is the case. (I don't really see t…

Thanks for changing your mind on receiving new information.

DFSG and the OSD are essentially the same thing, having been written both of them by Bruce Perens. Main difference is that Debian doesn't certify licenses: they ship software, so they look at the whole packages, so to speak. OSI only certify licenses, they don't ship software.

As to what the DFSG and OSD do that the FSF four principles don't, I think they are more detailed set of rules one can apply when trying to figure out whether some software is free or not. IMHO, the FSF principles are less operationally useful, despite describing categorically the same set of software.

Re: MongoDB switches up its open source license

#437

Post by jhasse »

DannyBee wrote: post #173
jhasse wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Our policy pages are clear on why we ban licenses, even things like AGPL. You'll note they are not economic concerns (IE google won't be able to monetize), but compliance ones. AGPL compliance wouldn't be that difficult if you remove making money from the equation. So indirectly your compliance concerns are based on economic concerns.

> AGPL compliance wouldn't be that difficult if you remove making money from the equation. So indirectly your compliance concerns are based on economic concerns. This is simply false (on both points), and you haven't given any reason it would be true past "i feel this way". Even with direct support from our build system, AGPL compliance is incredibly difficult relative to GPL and other licenses[1] This argument also…

Why do you have to distinguish between that?

Re: MongoDB switches up its open source license

#438

Post by jhasse »

WorldMaker wrote: post #187
jhasse wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Our policy pages are clear on why we ban licenses, even things like AGPL. You'll note they are not economic concerns (IE google won't be able to monetize), but compliance ones. AGPL compliance wouldn't be that difficult if you remove making money from the equation. So indirectly your compliance concerns are based on economic concerns.

No one knows what AGPL compliance actually means, whether money is being made or not. It has failed several lawyers' sniff tests for being potentially arbitrarily enforceable however the AGPL developer sees fit, and the general consensus is that we won't have any idea of what AGPL compliance even looks like until its had its day or three hundred in the court system defining what exactly its limits are (if any?).

And why is that a problem?

Re: MongoDB switches up its open source license

#439

Post by tannhaeuser »

vmbrasseur wrote: post #143
mpdehaan2 wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This seems like FUD to me. While OSI may have coined the term "open source" as a reaction to the word "free software" in the past, it did not invent the idea of free software. Rather, the term open source was a reaction to the desire for commerical enterprises to avoid saying software was free. Now it rejects the same argument from developers of software to make a profit, which I find ironic relative to the founding…

The OSI encourages and supports all people and organisations to profit from free and open source software. The ability to do so is enshrined in Item 6 of the Open Source Definition: https://opensource.org/osd-annotated The Open Source Definition provides a single point of reference for what it means for a project to be "open source." Licenses are submitted for approval by those who wish to prove that the license prov…

Rather than pontificating about terms and hilariously claiming unenforcable rights to commonly-used words, the OSI should look at the reason Redis, Mongo, and soon others seek to update their license terms. It's because development is simply not sustainable in times of cloud providers. Who does the OSI represent? Is their intent that nobody except cloud providers can earn a living, by commoditizing software?

Re: MongoDB switches up its open source license

#440

Post by tannhaeuser »

manigandham wrote: post #367
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…

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 le…

You've got it backwards. The fact that we now have cloud providers is a direct consequence of F/OSS and the software commoditization it brings. Cloud (running other people's software) and support are the only ways to make money in this market, so I'm expecting lots of fighting, cloud-specific forking, and license changes going forward. Cloud providers don't manage shit; they're just employing bottom-of-the-barrel staff to kindof keep things running, and put just enough development effort into their cloud offering to lock you in to their walled garden.
Post reply on HN