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

Making the GPL more scary

lwn.net

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 151 posts

Re: Making the GPL more scary

#51

Post by weinzierl »

>Like Redis Labs before it, MongoDB has concluded that this license allows a bit too much. In particular, cloud providers are offering access to MongoDB instances without cutting the company in on the resulting revenue stream, and that doesn't feel right. In response, MongoDB has just announced an immediate shift to its brand-new Server Side Public License (SSPL).

This paragraph conflates Redis' application of the Commons Clause [1] to its add-ons with the switch of the license for MongoDB from AGPL to its own license called SSPL[2]. This are in my eyes two very different things.

The Commons Clause is a commercial restriction and its creators are very clear about the fact that it is not an Open Source license.

The SSPL, on the other hand is, in my opinion, an adaption of the GPL to new distribution channels that goes even further than the AGPL. I see this as very much in line with the original spirit of the GPL, regardless whether MogoDB's motivation might be primarily commercial or not. These are just my 2 ct from a curious glance and I'd be very much interested how RMS sees this, I hope we will get a statement from him or the GNU project.

>There is a lesson here for contributors as well. The request for license approval notes that: "As of this writing, the MongoDB GITHUB repository shows over 43,000 commits, 680 releases, and over 350 contributors." To become one of those contributors, a developer must first sign MongoDB's contributor agreement, which assigns copyright ownership to MongoDB. Those contributors all gave MongoDB the right to relicense their code in this manner [...]

CLAs are pretty common nowadays and they can be a problem for potential contributors but pointing at MongoDB, for just doing what many other large OpenSource projects do, isn't fair.

[1] https://commonsclause.com/

[2] https://www.mongodb.com/licensing/server-side-public-license

Re: Making the GPL more scary

#52

Post by pjmlp »

trasz wrote: post #44
pjmlp wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And that is why BSDs will never be as big as Linux, companies don't like to give free beer back to the tap. Also why all new open source OSes done companies are all based on BSD/MIT licenses like Zephyr, RTOS, Fuchsia, ... When we get back to PD, Shareware world, don't start complaining companies don't contribute back.

Not true - if you compare various cases of GPL vs BSD, the theory of GPL helping the project just doesn’t hold. See MySQL vs Postgres, or GCC vs LLVM, or various MTAs.

LLVM in particular lacks many improvements done by embedded OEMs, one of them being Sony which has only contributed parts of the PS4 toolchain.

Re: Making the GPL more scary

#53

Post by StudentStuff »

tannhaeuser wrote: post #49
StudentStuff wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have found AGPLv3 useful, everything I do is under AGPLv3, if people want to use it under other terms, they can pay me for a branch under a mutually acceptable license. I will not maintain the alternatively licensed branch unless paid, and these branches after a few months are generally missing significant features. Its a fine revenue stream for me, and in the context of what I am building and the companies that ar…

MongoDB was AGPL, but according to MongoDB, Inc. that didn't stop cloud providers to sell it as service, without also publishing their management tools and everything else used to provision MongoDB under a license AGPL accepts. Hence MongoDB, Inc. came up with their license additions. IANAL, but depending on who you ask, AGPL is deemed unenforcable or even misusing copyright legislation. In any case, AGPL hasn't, to…

The key difference is I do not care if companies use AGPLv3 software I have written. MongoDB predicated their business model on getting companies to license their code rather than use the AGPLv3 version of the codebase.

> IANAL, but depending on who you ask, AGPL is deemed unenforcable or even misusing copyright legislation.

No clue wrt AGPL (an old, crusty license), but GPLv3 was written with heavy involvement of the Software Freedom Law Center. The Affero paragraph (which is the only difference between AGPLv3 and GPLv3) was written by this same team at the same time.

As a non-lawyer, I would presume the lawyers that were tasked with reviewing the various forms of the third revision of GPL licenses did their job.

Re: Making the GPL more scary

#54

Post by enriquto »

StudentStuff wrote: post #11
enriquto wrote: post #8

The AGPL is a great license for free software development. It is also great to be coupled with a proprietary license, something that does no often make sense with other licenses.

I have found AGPLv3 useful, everything I do is under AGPLv3, if people want to use it under other terms, they can pay me for a branch under a mutually acceptable license. I will not maintain the alternatively licensed branch unless paid, and these branches after a few months are generally missing significant features. Its a fine revenue stream for me, and in the context of what I am building and the companies that ar…

> Worst case someone extends one of my AGPLv3 projects, adding features and improving it. I'll accept a pull request with no CLA so long as the code is of decent quality.

Notice that it is perfectly fine to be "open source" without being "open development". Many free software projects do not actually accept pull requests as a matter of principle.

Re: Making the GPL more scary

#55

Post by StudentStuff »

enriquto wrote: post #54
StudentStuff wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have found AGPLv3 useful, everything I do is under AGPLv3, if people want to use it under other terms, they can pay me for a branch under a mutually acceptable license. I will not maintain the alternatively licensed branch unless paid, and these branches after a few months are generally missing significant features. Its a fine revenue stream for me, and in the context of what I am building and the companies that ar…

> Worst case someone extends one of my AGPLv3 projects, adding features and improving it. I'll accept a pull request with no CLA so long as the code is of decent quality. Notice that it is perfectly fine to be "open source" without being "open development". Many free software projects do not actually accept pull requests as a matter of principle.

I've run into projects run like this, but I would love to get some driveby pull requests. Sadly the segment I work in has very few software developers, but lots of people who are (needlessly) scared of the licensing bogeyman.

Re: Making the GPL more scary

#56

Post by jonathanstrange »

amingilani wrote: post #9

I'm probably going to get a lot of flak for this, but here's an opinion supporting the MongoDB license. Two things: 1. MongoDB has the right to do whatever they like ------------------------------------------------------ The creator of a product: 1. Has a rational interest in maximizing their returns 2. Owns all the rights to their products (barring existing IP restrictions) And if they choose to open source their co…

You're forgetting to mention that open source != free software.

I have no problem with the license itself, because it maintains the four freedoms. So from a free software perspective it's fine, and that's the spirit of GPL. However, if I was a business owner, I would never run software under that license because it may create unforeseeable license conflicts. As far as I can see (correct me if I'm wrong), any software running on the SaS stack would have to be compatible with GPL, and there are plenty of open source licenses that you might want to or need to use that are incompatible with GPL. For example, it seems that strictly speaking only fully FSF approved GNU/Linux distributions are compatible with that license.[1]

Or maybe I'm misinterpreting the license requirements? (IANAL)

[1] https://www.gnu.org/distros/free-distros.en.html

Re: Making the GPL more scary

#57

Post by thu »

Wouldn't it be possible for an entity such as Amazon to establish a separate legal entity and thus circumvent MongoDB's Server Side Public License ?

The separate entity would provide the "raw" service (where there wouldn't be much to open source) to Amazon, possibly running MongoDB directly on their infrastructure, then Amazon would turn it into a full-fledged SaaS offer.

Re: Making the GPL more scary

#58

Post by eadmund »

brobdingnagians wrote: post #32
pjmlp wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And that is why BSDs will never be as big as Linux, companies don't like to give free beer back to the tap. Also why all new open source OSes done companies are all based on BSD/MIT licenses like Zephyr, RTOS, Fuchsia, ... When we get back to PD, Shareware world, don't start complaining companies don't contribute back.

That's kind of the point though. BSD is truly free, and that means there are a lot of proprietary products which benefit massively from it and create worthwhile products with clear monetization strategies and thrive. Sure, they might not contribute back, but the point of the open source was often to share code to improve the state of the art and provide useful code for people so they don't have to start from scratch.…

> the point of the open source was often to share code to improve the state of the art and provide useful code for people so they don't have to start from scratch

Was that the point of free software? I thought that the point was freedom: that users be permitted to use, modify & redistribute the software they use. Inclusion of BSD-licensed code in proprietary software fails at that: a macOS user is unable to use macOS without paying for it; unable to legally modify it; and even if he did modify unable to legally distribute those modifications.

BSD-licensed code is awesome for vendors of proprietary software who want a head start; it's not so great for users.

Re: Making the GPL more scary

#59

Post by aequitas »

> "Service Source Code" means the Corresponding Source for the Program or the modified version, and the Corresponding Source for all programs that you use to make the Program or modified version available as a service, including, without limitation, management software, user interfaces, application program interfaces, automation software, monitoring software, backup software, storage software and hosting software, all such that a user could run an instance of the service using the Service Source Code you make available.

How could one even practically conform to this license? Unless you are a 100% pure open source house, every company uses proprietary software in some form. Be it the OS/Apps on your developers/operations (management software) laptops (macOS/Windows) or firmware/tooling (ILO, DRAC, etc) of your server stack.

I understand they want us to buy a proprietary mongo license, but I don't see how it would even be possible to run mongo as a service without.

Re: Making the GPL more scary

#60

Post by weinzierl »

bhickey wrote: post #42
amingilani wrote: post #9

I'm probably going to get a lot of flak for this, but here's an opinion supporting the MongoDB license. Two things: 1. MongoDB has the right to do whatever they like ------------------------------------------------------ The creator of a product: 1. Has a rational interest in maximizing their returns 2. Owns all the rights to their products (barring existing IP restrictions) And if they choose to open source their co…

> This License Means More Open Source Code You're going to get flak for this because you're factually incorrect. The SSPL is not an open source license. It might as well contain a clause that says "Thou shall not compete with MongoDB." As far as I can tell it was submitted to the OSI in bad faith.

> The SSPL is not an open source license.

So far this is just your opinion. If the OSI will approve it has yet to be seen...

Post reply on HN