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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

#211

Post by tluyben2 »

bad_user wrote: post #203
brazzledazzle wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

You can point at Amazon all you like, but this isn’t Open Source or Free Software. If you want to prevent others from using your “hard work”, then go with a proprietary license, but don’t pretend your proprietary license is FOSS because that’s hypocritical and many of us care about the guaranteed freedoms of FOSS, including making money off of other people’s hard work. MongoDB is trying to eat their cake and have it…

This is what it is all about; you believe in software to be free in a RMS kind of way or it is just a marketing gimmick. If you want software to be free, you do not care what Amazon does with it. That is clearly not MongoDB. They used FOSS as marketing tool and timed it well (it was a horrible shitshow of a product but many drank the koolaid; no idea what it is now, I will never touch it again) and now have to please investors. That is fine but let us not put this on ‘the big corporates’ please.

Re: MongoDB removed from RHEL 8 beta due to license

#212

Post by karmakaze »

jayofdoom wrote: post #147
merlynn wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Michael from MongoDB here... Greed? You realize that anyone can still view, download, use, develop, modify and do everything they could do prior to the change - right? The only difference is that if they decide to offer the licensed software as a public service they must release the other components of the service under the same license.

Honestly, from my perspective the problem is more the timing. If MongoDB had always been licensed this way, companies could make informed decisions about what product to use. Instead, you pulled a license bait and switch -- attracted people with a free-as-in-freedom license, then switched it for one that was less free after adoption picked up. That's not behavior I'd personally support as someone who has a career bec…

As you may know there are different senses of 'free' at work here. How you're using it is as 'freedom to use'. The other is 'freedom of the source code information' which is to say that derivative works must also be released into the open. Open-source now has these two competing views. I would complain if software that was MIT licensed switched to a GPL one as it's switching camps. I would complain less if a GPL one switched to AGPL. I agree that it's best to choose the license that matches your beliefs from the start. We must also accept that a change in license is a distinct possibility and that we are free to fork.

Re: MongoDB removed from RHEL 8 beta due to license

#213

Post by metheus »

bad_user wrote: post #207
metheus wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I also work for MongoDB. I respect your opinion about whether the SSPL is free or open, but it is not one that is uniformly shared by the OSI, as evidenced by the discussion currently underway in the license-approval mailing list. Many have argued in its favor. On that basis, some of your assertions in paragraph one are subjective. Not that there’s anything wrong with subjectivity! I think it is valid to ask the ques…

Businesses have to survive in a competitive market, I get it, you don't have to apologize for it and it's not greed, it's just how the market works. That said, you did not work with OSI or the FSF before changing the license. And your company is not the only contributor to MongoDB, you have third party contributors as well, who did not have a say in it, because of the copyright attribution that you require. In other…

I appreciate your comment about how the market works, thanks for that.

You certainly have a point about our not working with the OSI prior to issuing the SSPL. All other things being equal, we would like to have, but as a publicly traded company it's just not responsible to announce "we will be changing our license... to... something... we'll get back to you on what that'll be... sometime."

We weren't happy about it, but we're doing the best we can given the constraints. We're all grownups, and accept that one of the consequences is that some in the OSS community feel betrayed by that change, but we ask that you let our actions going forward, not the worst suspicions of those most predisposed to judge us harshly, determine what you think of our dedication to OSS and our community.

As for non-employee contributors to the MongoDB codebase (who account for about 3% of the codebase), I think we should credit them with the same adult responsibility for their actions as we hold MongoDB to. Their contributions were made in full knowledge of the attribution requirement, and we have no reason to believe -- and no evidence -- that they resent anything MongoDB as a company has done.

Re: MongoDB removed from RHEL 8 beta due to license

#214

Post by [deleted] »

tluyben2 wrote: post #211
bad_user wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can point at Amazon all you like, but this isn’t Open Source or Free Software. If you want to prevent others from using your “hard work”, then go with a proprietary license, but don’t pretend your proprietary license is FOSS because that’s hypocritical and many of us care about the guaranteed freedoms of FOSS, including making money off of other people’s hard work. MongoDB is trying to eat their cake and have it…

This is what it is all about; you believe in software to be free in a RMS kind of way or it is just a marketing gimmick. If you want software to be free, you do not care what Amazon does with it. That is clearly not MongoDB. They used FOSS as marketing tool and timed it well (it was a horrible shitshow of a product but many drank the koolaid; no idea what it is now, I will never touch it again) and now have to please…

[deleted]

Re: MongoDB removed from RHEL 8 beta due to license

#215

Post by kemitchell »

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…

Thank you for linking to the e-mail from Tom Callaway.

Re: MongoDB removed from RHEL 8 beta due to license

#216

Post by kemitchell »

DannyBee wrote: post #100
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.

Yes, you can. You have obligations if you distribute it. Even the AGPL simply gives you obligations. There have been arguments about whether the AGPL is discriminatory, and those have been mostly waved away (wrongly, i think, but c'est la vie). In that vein, SSPL is arguably a free license. It simply changes when obligations to distribute source occur. Compare to the the commons clause, which is not a free license -…

I completely agree. I would only add that there have also been arguments about whether GPLv2 is discriminatory, though they also feel long behind us now.

In case it's interesting, here's my standard reference link on nondiscrimination under OSD 5 and 6: https://writing.kemitchell.com/2018/11/05/OSD-Copyleft-Regul...

Re: MongoDB removed from RHEL 8 beta due to license

#217

Post by kemitchell »

amyjess wrote: post #54
lmm wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

From the Open Source Definition: > 9. License Must Not Restrict Other Software > The license must not place restrictions on other software that is distributed along with the licensed software. For example, the license must not insist that all other programs distributed on the same medium must be open-source software.

It's very hard to read OSD 9 in context to prohibit SSPL. https://writing.kemitchell.com/2018/11/05/OSD-Copyleft-Regul...

Bruce Perens sees it as N/A for a narrower reason: http://lists.opensource.org/pipermail/license-review_lists.o...

Re: MongoDB removed from RHEL 8 beta due to license

#218

Post by kemitchell »

I recently published a sketch of a plain-language license generalizing the SSPL approach. Feedback of all kinds welcome!

https://github.com/kemitchell/shared-component-license

At a minimum, I think my language can make the issues clearer. Folks don't want to wade 12 sections deep into AGPLv3, much less a path to AGPLv3. I can't blame them.

Re: MongoDB removed from RHEL 8 beta due to license

#219

Post by kemitchell »

e1ven wrote: post #177
zachruss92 wrote: post #165

I'm not super surprised that RHEL removed Mongo because of the licensing change. I don't completely understand why people getting upset about the licensing, however. As far as I know, MongoDB is still open source. If you are a hosting provider offering "MongoDB as a Service" the provider then needs to pay a licensing fee to Mongo. This seems ok to me, with the logic that MongoDB is a business that needs to make money…

It is not generally considered Open Source. The new license was rejected by the OSI, which is generally regarded as the defacto arbitrator of if something is OSS or not. It was also rejected by Red Hat and Debian as being not open source. There are various issues with the license, including the scope of what they considered tainted. You could read the mailing list archives on the subject, or there appears to be a sum…

OSI has not rejected SSPL, v1 or v2. Mongo substituted for v2 in review, and v2 is still in debate.

To my knowledge, OSI has never affirmatively rejected a license. A proposal to change its process to include rejection, which came up during SSPL review, remains pending.

Re: MongoDB removed from RHEL 8 beta due to license

#220

Post by kemitchell »

matthewmacleod wrote: post #180
zachruss92 wrote: post #165

I'm not super surprised that RHEL removed Mongo because of the licensing change. I don't completely understand why people getting upset about the licensing, however. As far as I know, MongoDB is still open source. If you are a hosting provider offering "MongoDB as a Service" the provider then needs to pay a licensing fee to Mongo. This seems ok to me, with the logic that MongoDB is a business that needs to make money…

As far as I know, MongoDB is still open source. If you are a hosting provider offering "MongoDB as a Service" the provider then needs to pay a licensing fee to Mongo. To me, those are two contradictory statements. The software is not open-source if its license restricts the purposes for which it can be used, QED.

SSPL does not prohibit any kind of use. Section 13 attaches a copyleft condition to use in provision of the software as a hosted service.
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