> Discriminating against such uses doesn't seem wrong to me since they clearly harm the creators and maintainers in their effort to actually make some income from the project
It may not be wrong, but it does stand in opposition to the definition of Open Source and Free Software (at least as defined by bodies that RedHat and many others see as authoritative on that subject).
So perhaps we could call MongoDB what it is - a proprietary software with shared code license that lets you run their code for free in some scenarios. I think that wouldn't sell to the investors and VCs as well as open source though, and would make it harder to build a community around.
And then we haven't even touched on the CLA required to make contributions to the project - I have no idea how many people and companies contributed changes or fixes to MongoDB, but they must be pretty happy right now.
Does that mean you can't have a business built around an open source project? It does seem that way to me, especially if we talk about something that scales in a number of employees and revenue. I do think that you could bootstrap a small, consultancy-style business, built around your open source technology, but definitely not something that VCs would drool over.
Also, on a related note, I'd like to add something that's rough around the edges and I'm sure someone else could make a much better case of it, but well, here I go.
There has always been a discussion on Free Software vs. Open Source [1] where the advocates of Free Software are arguing that Open Source does not protect freedom of the users (and communities) while Open Source advocates opposed that view with argument that Open Source is even more free and pure than Free Software.
In my opinion, the recent changes made by MongoDB, Redis Labs [2] and even Elastic [3] show that without ethics backing the movement, the movement itself is in danger of having its core believes changed.
If some software can't be made in a spirit of Free Software (or even Open Source) then perhaps it should be made as proprietary software with shared code license - it's not as cool, and perhaps will make the adoption harder, but at least it's more sincere.
[1] For example, see Stallman's "Why Open Source misses the point of Free Software" article https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/open-source-misses-the-point....
[2] Calling their non-free licenses "Apache-2 + Common Clause" is a pretty disingenuous move, and the only reason why I see it less bad than what Mongo did being the fact that it only affects a subset of previously-closed extensions IIRC.
[3] Their announcement on x-pack did not call it open source, however the entire press release was full of "open source" this and "open source" - it felt like they tried really hard to ride the Open Source train without actually riding it.