41–50 of 291 posts
Can somebody tell me what is wrong is SSPL? I just don't understand what this hostility is all about. A company creates a crucial infrastructure component which is a database, open sources it, everybody can use it for free, cloud vendors started just installing it on their servers or making clones of it and making profit off it, everybody is using a component that took years and millions of dollars to develop but the…
What’s the executive summary of what’s going on with Mongo, and why other commenters are referring to using mongo as a mistake?
Mongo provides you computer code packed into a tarball and forbids you from profiting from new code derived from it by your own work. Is this ethical?
Is either example more or less ethical if the price is, or is not, $0?
That’s the debate in a nutshell.
(I declare no position on either scenario presented, and will not, so that the explanation stands apart from my ethical opinions.)
Can somebody tell me what is wrong is SSPL? I just don't understand what this hostility is all about. A company creates a crucial infrastructure component which is a database, open sources it, everybody can use it for free, cloud vendors started just installing it on their servers or making clones of it and making profit off it, everybody is using a component that took years and millions of dollars to develop but the…
More practically, MongoDB offers their own managed hosting service. Are they paying the Linux Foundation for the OS they’re almost certainly running? How about nginx / HAProxy / Let’s Encrypt / whatever else they’re using in their stack? This isn’t to say that there’s anything wrong with charging for software, but it’s pretty hypocritical to point their finger at others for profiting off free software whilst doing so themselves.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Free_Software_Definition
Would love to see an overview of companies that fell into the mongoDB trap and have / are migrating to another DB store.
Over the last few Months we’ve switched over to amazons document db just to have a managed service. We don’t regret it.
As much as I love a managed service this was a very disappointing effort from AWS.
Can somebody tell me what is wrong is SSPL? I just don't understand what this hostility is all about. A company creates a crucial infrastructure component which is a database, open sources it, everybody can use it for free, cloud vendors started just installing it on their servers or making clones of it and making profit off it, everybody is using a component that took years and millions of dollars to develop but the…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Didn’t Stripe go down this road?
Yes, in addition they apparently use a pretty outdated version of it. (Several people mentioned this on a related HN thread that I'm having trouble locating.)
>... they continue to build on top of a broken foundation (MongoDB) ...but last I heard Stripe was still running a very outdated version ...
Serious question: can someone explain why the server side public license is not an open source license, with specific reference to AGPL? Is it because of the provision forcing the source code release of auxillary software used to run the software as a service? As far as I can tell, it meets the FSF's free software definition and the only that seems questionable in the OSI's open source definition is point 9.
> can someone explain why the server side public license is not an open source license Depends on what you think 'open source' licence means. The source is literally openly available. There are just some extra restrictions on what you can do with it. The FSF and the OSI don't own what 'open source' means, of course - the term predates them and comes from intelligence.
Ref please?
The FSF was certainly around pushing for "free software" long before "open source" was commonly used to refer to copyleft / permissive licenses. And the sole purpose for OSI's existence is exactly to define what is and is not "open source".
In any case, it is very important to define terminology and protect its use. The goal of "open source" is certainly not to simply let people look at the source, but to let people use the source in certain ways. People have thought long and hard about exactly what the minimum standards are to consider something "free software" or "open source".
You can find the core criteria for OSI here: https://opensource.org/osd
And the "Four Freedoms" for the Free Software Foundation here:
Can somebody tell me what is wrong is SSPL? I just don't understand what this hostility is all about. A company creates a crucial infrastructure component which is a database, open sources it, everybody can use it for free, cloud vendors started just installing it on their servers or making clones of it and making profit off it, everybody is using a component that took years and millions of dollars to develop but the…
I don't think your baker metaphor holds up though, because a major component of open source software is that people outside of the companies support it. A better metaphor would be if the bakery had started by using volunteers to create all the recipes, and then the baker decided that people could only use those recipes if they followed his terms so that the baker could stop other bakeries from competing. This obvious…
asked this on a sqllite thread before but: anyone know a single file nosqldb that has good python bindings. i know I could just write to json or something but I'd like something that supports queries. right now I'm using MongoDB and it's completely Overkill
Postgres supports querying json
What’s the executive summary of what’s going on with Mongo, and why other commenters are referring to using mongo as a mistake?
These restrictions mean it is no longer an open source project. It is also worrying for a lot of people that mongo was willing to change license terms like this, as it means they may be willing to do so in the future if it brings them more money.
Since mongo has reached the point where they're competing on license terms, not on service or via their product, mongodb may not be the best choice for someone starting a new project. At this point lots of other options exist, with stable and open source solutions like postgres having document store features built in as well. In fact for a lot of use cases postgres already performs much better than mongodb, leaving the real question to be why anyone would choose to use mongodb at this point.