Nutanix Objects violates MinIO’s open source license

> They may not even think about such mundane things like licensing and stuff, that's what they have higher ups for.

Oh, come on. Engineers these days are not stupid. While I agree that their boss could plainly lie to them that he bought a commercial license, it was more like, "What will we use for the underlying storage?" "Maybe MiniIO, they're S3-compatible and efficient." "Fine. Can we use their code, though?" "Sure, it's open source, and we are a *aaS business, so no problem." I saw this kind of thinking before.

Sometimes it's pretty cut and dry, just people using open source without attribution and hoping that nobody will find out. But why?

MinIO is licensed under AGPL (the current versions, at least): https://github.com/minio/minio/blob/master/LICENSE

It effectively mandates that the modified version needs to be made available: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_Affero_General_Public_Lice...

  The GNU Affero General Public License is a modified version of the ordinary GNU GPL version 3. It has one added requirement: if you run a modified program on a server and let other users communicate with it there, your server must also allow them to download the source code corresponding to the modified version running there.

So the logical first question is: why pick software that is using AGPL? Did the engineers/managers just not care? Did they miss it? I know for a fact that there are many out there who couldn't care less about licenses and compliance. Maybe companies haven't been strong armed into caring about licensing as much as they have been in regards to GDPR, for example?

Secondly, why should the modified version remain a "secret"? Would competition suddenly spring up? Or maybe the project contains tight coupling to the rest of the platform, which could be considered a security risk?

Why isn't open sourcing a modified version something that would take a few hours anyways, since then none of this would be an issue?

(disclaimer: I discuss SSPL below because I find it interesting; apologies for the tangent)

Honestly, the state of software licensing sometimes puzzles me. For example, MongoDB switched over to SSPL altogether: https://www.mongodb.com/community/licensing

  If you make the functionality of the Program or a modified version available to third parties as a service, you must make the Service Source Code available via network download to everyone at no charge, under the terms of this License. ...

Seems like that applies to even patches: https://github.com/mongodb/mongo

  MongoDB is free and the source is available. Versions released prior to October 16, 2018 are published under the AGPL. All versions released after October 16, 2018, including patch fixes for prior versions, are published under the Server Side Public License (SSPL) v1. See individual files for details.

DigitalOcean, for example, proudly advertises managed MongoDB as a service: https://www.digitalocean.com/products/managed-databases-mong...

And yet, to the best of my understanding, the entirety of the DigitalOcean platform isn't open source (even though many projects are): https://github.com/orgs/digitalocean/repositories

Or even anything that might have something to do with MongoDB in particular: https://github.com/orgs/digitalocean/repositories?q=mongo&ty...

It just feels like one of those "rules for thee, not for me" situations, since it wouldn't be feasible for small companies to compete with them. Edit: someone mentioned them probably running the enterprise version which is probably the explanation for this!

That said, the thought experiment of building a company (including all systems) as 100% open source is really interesting, whether such a thing would be feasible if people stopped caring about "guarding" their IP and whatnot.

Software engineers are in a position of great privilege: if we can’t hold ourselves to account, what are we doing? Almost any software engineer put in a difficult position can get up and walk into another job — “it’s not my decision” is not an acceptable excuse for (almost any) software engineer.

Blame lies with those who are complicit by choice, just as much as those who are directing the behaviour.

No idea about the relationship between MongoDB and DigitalOcean, but note that you've linked to the "community" edition; their site also shows an "enterprise" edition, which is more likely for a large entity like DigitalOcean to be using.

You are being downvoted but I actually think there are some fair points that you are making.

We use a lot of FOSS in our company. We pay licenses and contribute very little (our job isn't to improve gitlab or docker, we are shipping a software product on top of that), but I wouldn't know where exactly we are in the legal-illegal spectrum to save my life.

I consider myself an employee, not an entrepreneur. If I was an entrepreneur, I sure would happily seek legal advice on what exactly is fair use of open source. But really, I wouldn't know who to trust on the free advice market to figure out what I'm allowed and not allowed to do when starting up. I have absolutely 0 interest in legal stuff and it's mostly scary and confusing to me (and that's probably why I don't do any entrepreneurship, not even a side hustle in consulting), and I wish I and other salary men would be given a break about what the company is doing.

Nutanix shouldn't do what they are doing, but I don't think engineers should be to blame. At the end of the day, if an employee would have to go through everything that the company might not do perfectly right before deciding on a job, we would work nowhere. I wouldn't work for Oracle, but where to draw the line exactly ?