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MongoDB removed from RHEL 8 beta due to license

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Re: MongoDB removed from RHEL 8 beta due to license

#191

Post by Proven »

lmm wrote: post #45
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 don't see the rationale for their claims that the license is non-free? There's nothing discriminatory on the face of it. Plenty of acknowledgedly free licenses make commercial users uncomfortable (e.g. the AGPL).

Any license that I must understand and consider, makes me uncomfortable. The MIT, Apache 2.0, BSD and such: I go ahead as soon as I see it's one of these. Nothing to be concerned about.

If it's one of the fake-free licenses, then I must carefully consider how I might use it both now and later and whether some important details may later change causing me inconvenience.

I wouldn't call such licenses "discriminatory", that'd be nonsense. No one is forced to to use software that comes with them.

Re: MongoDB removed from RHEL 8 beta due to license

#192

Post by kodablah »

brazzledazzle wrote: post #188
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’ll never understand why we collectively wag our fingers at individuals or companies that try to keep the likes of Amazon from building a profitable service off of their hard work then contribute back little-to-nothing. Would redis, mongodb and dgraph have even considered alternate licensing if companies like Amazon had thrown them a minuscule amount of funding and patches? We can’t know because they didn’t. And the…

People are tired of restrictions, regardless of whether they are the ones targeted. The behavior is not aggressive in any sense and these types of restrictions are worked around predictably. You are making the mistake of confusing the intent of the changes with the reality as though the opposers favor the giants. In reality, something free for everyone might be misused and that's ok because of the size of the benefits. Free software needs to stop trying to pick and choose winners, because what they want to happen rarely does.

Re: MongoDB removed from RHEL 8 beta due to license

#193

Post by threeseed »

kstrauser wrote: post #132
threeseed wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Last I checked, they weren't a major contributor to the Linux kernel, or GNU, or GCC, or Emacs/Vim MongoDB only needs the Linux kernel/GNU/GCC when it's running or compiling on Linux. On OSX and Windows it uses other toolchains. And your point goes against the entire spirit of open source. No one should be forced to contribute back to open source less they be criticised by the community.

> MongoDB only needs the Linux kernel/GNU/GCC when it's running or compiling on Linux. Good call. They should also be contributing back to those toolchains. > No one should be forced to contribute back to open source less they be criticised by the community. That right there is what we call irony. This is precisely what Mongo is trying to do.

So if I build an application on Linux I should be contributing back to Linux, GCC, Clang, CMake and the hundreds or thousands of libraries I use.

That makes absolutely no sense.

Re: MongoDB removed from RHEL 8 beta due to license

#194

Post by 013a »

brazzledazzle wrote: post #188
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’ll never understand why we collectively wag our fingers at individuals or companies that try to keep the likes of Amazon from building a profitable service off of their hard work then contribute back little-to-nothing. Would redis, mongodb and dgraph have even considered alternate licensing if companies like Amazon had thrown them a minuscule amount of funding and patches? We can’t know because they didn’t. And the…

The bigger concern should be that databases like MongoDB and Redis are part of an older breed. The newest databases, built to handle the most demanding load, like DynamoDB, Aurora, or CloudSpanner, are intimately tied to the cloud providers they're deployed on, for legitimately necessary reasons. As the world gets more complex and demanding, this old model of "I've got a server, lets put a database on it" just doesn't scale, even including these "web scale" NoSQL databases like MongoDB.

No one beside AWS (or Google or Microsoft) is even capable of building databases to meet these new challenges. For now.

Cost plays into this as well. DocumentDB is so cheap because it is built on the Aurora storage engine, which in turn is intimately tied to the infrastructure. MongoDB Atlas can't compete with that. They have to charge you more because they can still point to the servers that your database is running on. An Aurora database might be spread across a dozen different servers and services within AWS, taking up just bits and pieces of processing on each; the parts of Aurora that need lots of storage are on machines optimized for that, the parts that need compute are on machines optimized for that, they're all connected with terabits of networking, and those pennies of savings turn into hundreds of dollars at scale which they can pass on to their customers.

Google did the SAME THING years ago with Cloud Memorystore, which exposes a Redis API. Microsoft did the same thing with CosmosDB, which exposes a MongoDB API (among others). Why? Its because the fundamental tech that MongoDB built isn't good. MongoDB is so unbelievably uninteresting to Amazon. Why would they even want to contribute back to it? If they adopted MongoDB wholesale, they and their customers would be worse-off for it. The only people that would win is MongoDB.

But they are interested in the API, because that's what their customers are using.

The license is a red herring. The real reason Amazon did this is the tech. They now have the Aurora storage engine and DynamoDB, which they can put any API they want on top of and it'll be cheaper, more performant, more resilient to failure, and easier to scale than taking "Database of the month X", throwing it on an EC2 instance, and calling it Managed.

And the reason why we're seeing this centralization is because Amazon made the investment in Infrastructure while MongoDB just wanted to build a cool database. Didn't Alan Kay warn us that if you care about the software, you have to care about the hardware? Did we really believe that this only applies to consumer experiences? Amazon didn't. And that's why they're winning.

Re: MongoDB removed from RHEL 8 beta due to license

#195

Post by bb611 »

kstrauser wrote: post #132
threeseed wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Last I checked, they weren't a major contributor to the Linux kernel, or GNU, or GCC, or Emacs/Vim MongoDB only needs the Linux kernel/GNU/GCC when it's running or compiling on Linux. On OSX and Windows it uses other toolchains. And your point goes against the entire spirit of open source. No one should be forced to contribute back to open source less they be criticised by the community.

> MongoDB only needs the Linux kernel/GNU/GCC when it's running or compiling on Linux. Good call. They should also be contributing back to those toolchains. > No one should be forced to contribute back to open source less they be criticised by the community. That right there is what we call irony. This is precisely what Mongo is trying to do.

That's not really what they're trying to do.

What they're trying to do is make it so challenging to host MongoDB as a service that cloud providers can't do it. They implemented it with an absurd requirement forcing contributions to open source, but the intent is not to improve open source, it's to end regain market control.

Re: MongoDB removed from RHEL 8 beta due to license

#196

Post by neltnerb »

rcdwealth wrote: post #89
privateSFacct wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Distribution of binaries is allowed. It is another matter and subject on how to properly use trademarks.

Right, I remember this coming up with Iceweasel because of Firefox trademarks.

https://lwn.net/Articles/676799/

Re: MongoDB removed from RHEL 8 beta due to license

#197

Post by kstrauser »

threeseed wrote: post #193
kstrauser wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> MongoDB only needs the Linux kernel/GNU/GCC when it's running or compiling on Linux. Good call. They should also be contributing back to those toolchains. > No one should be forced to contribute back to open source less they be criticised by the community. That right there is what we call irony. This is precisely what Mongo is trying to do.

So if I build an application on Linux I should be contributing back to Linux, GCC, Clang, CMake and the hundreds or thousands of libraries I use. That makes absolutely no sense.

If you’re building your application on Linux and complaining that other make money off it (in accordance with your license), then yes, I absolutely expect that you better be supporting all the people whose work you’re building off of.

Re: MongoDB removed from RHEL 8 beta due to license

#198

Post by kstrauser »

bb611 wrote: post #195
kstrauser wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> MongoDB only needs the Linux kernel/GNU/GCC when it's running or compiling on Linux. Good call. They should also be contributing back to those toolchains. > No one should be forced to contribute back to open source less they be criticised by the community. That right there is what we call irony. This is precisely what Mongo is trying to do.

That's not really what they're trying to do. What they're trying to do is make it so challenging to host MongoDB as a service that cloud providers can't do it. They implemented it with an absurd requirement forcing contributions to open source, but the intent is not to improve open source, it's to end regain market control.

I totally agree. I’m convinced of it. The license shenanigans are just the means to that end.

Re: MongoDB removed from RHEL 8 beta due to license

#200

Post by statictype »

brazzledazzle wrote: post #188
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’ll never understand why we collectively wag our fingers at individuals or companies that try to keep the likes of Amazon from building a profitable service off of their hard work then contribute back little-to-nothing. Would redis, mongodb and dgraph have even considered alternate licensing if companies like Amazon had thrown them a minuscule amount of funding and patches? We can’t know because they didn’t. And the…

So I agree with what you said but I also agree that it should be removed from RHEL and Debian.

It's totally within MongoDB's rights to change their license to combat unfair behavior from giant cloud providers. And its totally fair for distros to remove Mongo because of the license change.

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