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

MongoDB removed from RHEL 8 beta due to license

access.redhat.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 231 posts

Re: MongoDB removed from RHEL 8 beta due to license

#61

Post by privateSFacct »

mcny wrote: post #41
bubblethink wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, but as a customer of RH, you are not allowed to distribute RH's binaries, or they will terminate your contract. That is also against the spirit of the GPL, although not necessarily the letter. You can take the source, remove the branding, recompile, and redistribute, which is similar to what CentOS does/used to. However, the GPL allows the former too. i.e., You can straight up distribute the binaries under GPL.

Yes, it does seem against the spirit of freedom 2. » The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help others (freedom 2). https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.en.html But it seems strange to even think that Red Hat would do anything that violates the idea of free software. Surely there must be about angle to it that we have not considered?

They don't want you redistributing something called Redhat Enterprise Linux after you backdoor it?

Re: MongoDB removed from RHEL 8 beta due to license

#63

Post by TrueDuality »

afroboy wrote: post #58
gigatexal wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But RHEL is not free. So... can’t this be included then only used after the user sets up a license?

It's 100% free, you can use CentOS which is identical to RHEL and provided by Redhat.

While it's true CentOS is free and exactly the same (minus a few packages that needed to change RHEL to CentOS), RHEL is exclusively a licensed distribution and is a commercial product.

Re: MongoDB removed from RHEL 8 beta due to license

#64

Post by lmm »

jerf wrote: post #60
lmm wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By that logic the GPL is also non-free, since you can't run a GPL program embedded in a closed-source management program.

You own sentence shows the relevant difference: "embedded". The GPL license has always stopped at the OS process boundary. You can essentially do whatever you want with a GPL program as long as you interact with it over standard OS mechanisms, rather than direct modification; you're still obligated to distribute source but it's source that is already publicly available, so there's no proprietary interest in it. Mongo…

> The GPL license has always stopped at the OS process boundary. You can essentially do whatever you want with a GPL program as long as you interact with it over standard OS mechanisms, rather than direct modification

Not strictly the case according to the FSF's FAQ; the GPL applies to anything that integrates deeply enough with the covered program to constitute a "derivative work" under copyright law, which is not necessarily the process boundary.

> Neither does the AGPL, to show this isn't new.

Indeed - so what is RedHat's rationale for permitting AGPL but disallowing this MongoDB license?

Re: MongoDB removed from RHEL 8 beta due to license

#65

Post by klez »

lmm wrote: post #56
lozenge wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"The freedom to run the program as you wish, for any purpose" (freedom 0) You can't run it using closed source management software to offer MongoDB as a service.

By that logic the GPL is also non-free, since you can't run a GPL program embedded in a closed-source management program.

> you can't run a GPL program embedded in a closed-source management program

Uh? Of course you can. What kind of scenario are you envisioning that makes running a GPLed software not legal?

Re: MongoDB removed from RHEL 8 beta due to license

#66

Post by tpaschalis »

giancarlostoro wrote: post #22

It seems[0] the new MongoDB license is basically non-free and it would make no sense to include it in RHEL8. I hope Debian and other distros follow suit as a result if they come in agreement. It's sad that the license change all resorts to greed basically, as if Oracle took over MongoDB. If I were to ever use a NoSQL database for a new project I'd aim for MIT / 2-clause BSD based projects instead. PostgreSQL has no i…

Well, distros will follow through. One such example could be the rise of `systemd`; once it was adopted by Fedora/RHEL it was game over for `init`.

Re: MongoDB removed from RHEL 8 beta due to license

#67

Post by growtofill »

xellisx wrote: post #32
giancarlostoro wrote: post #22

It seems[0] the new MongoDB license is basically non-free and it would make no sense to include it in RHEL8. I hope Debian and other distros follow suit as a result if they come in agreement. It's sad that the license change all resorts to greed basically, as if Oracle took over MongoDB. If I were to ever use a NoSQL database for a new project I'd aim for MIT / 2-clause BSD based projects instead. PostgreSQL has no i…

I had hopes for MongoDB back 10 years ago, but it just let me down. I'm thinking of trying out ArangoDB next. OrientDB is just riddled with bug and their docs are lack luster.

But MongoDB is only 9 yo!

Re: MongoDB removed from RHEL 8 beta due to license

#68

Post by mbreese »

nathell wrote: post #55
sascha_sl wrote: post #25

MongoDB is the reason I don't contribute (outside of work) to any copyleft project that asks for copyright assignment anymore.

Care to elaborate?

If you have a project that accepts code from outside contributors, you can only re-license the project iff you have a copyright assignment from all of the outside contributors.

This is because by default, new code from an outside contributor is only granted to the original project under the original license and the copyright is owned by the contributor. If the company managing the project wants to change the license, they would need to contact each contributor and get a new license (unlikely), or remove the code from the project (equally unlikely). However, if the company only accepts patches or code that also includes a copyright assignment, the company can change the license to whatever they want without any input from their contributors.

Re: MongoDB removed from RHEL 8 beta due to license

#69

Post by TimMurnaghan »

pytyper2 wrote: post #48

Good, Mongo is rarely the right database.

Absolutely. My characterization of Mongo is that it's the back end choice of front end developers. The only possible justification for it could be time to MVP (and that's being kind). It's bad for all of the reasons that back-end people make back-end choices - non-functional requirements like operability, clustering, etc.

Hopefully this is the start of it being removed from any infrastructure uses. I spun up an openstack instance the other day and was horrified to find Mongo in there.

Re: MongoDB removed from RHEL 8 beta due to license

#70

Post by bubblethink »

sfifs wrote: post #59
bubblethink wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, but as a customer of RH, you are not allowed to distribute RH's binaries, or they will terminate your contract. That is also against the spirit of the GPL, although not necessarily the letter. You can take the source, remove the branding, recompile, and redistribute, which is similar to what CentOS does/used to. However, the GPL allows the former too. i.e., You can straight up distribute the binaries under GPL.

GPL very explicitly refers to the right to distribute source code. It is not concerned with binaries. That was an explicit choice since the license spirit is about user freedom which concerns access to sources and modifying sources. See clause #1: https://www.gnu.org/licenses/old-licenses/gpl-2.0.en.html

Thanks. Following that, section 3 goes on to say "copy and distribute the Program (or a work based on it, under Section 2) in object code or executable form". So it doesn't seem to preclude re-distribution of binaries, as long as you follow the terms.
Post reply on HN