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MongoDB's Server Side Public License Is Likely Unenforceable

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Re: MongoDB's Server Side Public License Is Likely Unenforceable

#121

Post by GiorgioG »

village-idiot wrote: post #60
_verandaguy wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While I like relational data and I _love_ Postgres specifically, there are some tasks and contexts for which non-relational stores are better suited.

I agree, although I think the use cases for non-relational databases is overstated, but I view MongoDB as one of the most dangerous pieces of software I’ve had to touch. It demos great, but long term usage of MongoDB has been nothing but pain for me. Lost writes, all three nodes deciding the other is primary, crappy performance if you’re just outside of the indices, and extremely painful migrations all come to mind.…

Let me echo that sentiment, I also hate MongoDb. I had to setup / manage a MongoDb cluster in 2012-2013. It was a giant shitshow. Maybe things have gotten better, but I have little desire to test the waters with MongoDb again. I'd rather use https://www.rethinkdb.com/ if I really needed NoSQL / scalability.

Re: MongoDB's Server Side Public License Is Likely Unenforceable

#122

Post by yutghgh »

SOLAR_FIELDS wrote: post #119
chrisweekly wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

weary (tired) -> wary (concerned) not nit-picking, just attempting to help other readers who aren't native English speakers

For those that don’t know, they are sometimes pronounced the exact same, which is why they are often mixed up (see also affect and effect). Where I’m from weary is pronounced WEER-y though.

Not true (at least in the US): weary (at least the adjective) is pronounced with a "we" at the beginning, while wary is pronounced with a "wear" at the beginning.

Re: MongoDB's Server Side Public License Is Likely Unenforceable

#123

Post by toomuchtodo »

kstrauser wrote: post #106
toomuchtodo wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because you don’t feel others are freeloading on you does not mean software consumers aren’t freeloading. You’re free to change your licenses (or not), just as other projects are (but should). It’s time the free ride and expectations of charity by for-profit users ends.

What is freeloading? MongoDB is building a project off the works of others and selling it. So am I. If you're employed, so are you. And in return, hopefully we all contribute back to that ecosystem so that the next person can build off our new work. You say "freeloading". I say "participating in a rich culture of shared work". Maybe I don't contribute all my local work to Emacs upstream, but I push out a lot of Pytho…

Try paying your rent and grocery bill with “participating in a rich culture of shared work”. It’s just as much of a joke as “pay you? It’ll give you exposure!” frequently expressed to creatives.

It’s clearly not mutually beneficial when one side is reaping outsized rewards (and not at all ashamed about it), and your example of small contributions to vim and python is disingenuous; we’re talking about entire software packages used without compensation by businesses (Redis, Elastic, Mongo to name a few).

Re: MongoDB's Server Side Public License Is Likely Unenforceable

#124

Post by GiorgioG »

egeozcan wrote: post #112
GiorgioG wrote: post #3

Use Postgres, problem solved.

The technical side of it is irrelevant IMHO. I'm pretty sure they wouldn't but what if Postgres people did this too? What if others followed?

I don't think that's even remotely possible given how Postgres is structured: https://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/FAQ#Who_controls_PostgreSQL...

Re: MongoDB's Server Side Public License Is Likely Unenforceable

#125

Post by kstrauser »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #123
kstrauser wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is freeloading? MongoDB is building a project off the works of others and selling it. So am I. If you're employed, so are you. And in return, hopefully we all contribute back to that ecosystem so that the next person can build off our new work. You say "freeloading". I say "participating in a rich culture of shared work". Maybe I don't contribute all my local work to Emacs upstream, but I push out a lot of Pytho…

Try paying your rent and grocery bill with “participating in a rich culture of shared work”. It’s just as much of a joke as “pay you? It’ll give you exposure!” frequently expressed to creatives. It’s clearly not mutually beneficial when one side is reaping outsized rewards (and not at all ashamed about it), and your example of small contributions to vim and python is disingenuous; we’re talking about entire software…

Did Redis, Elastic, Mongo et al pay for Linux development, or glibc, or their text editors, or compilers, or ...? Why should they get the financial benefit from building on top of others' donated work - and claim to be an equal participant in the FOSS ecosystem - and then be peeved with others expect the same in return?

If Mongo were a closed, proprietary product who wanted to be paid, sure. I happily pay for Apple stuff, for instance. But saying "hey, come use our FOSS project!" and then pivoting to "...as long as you pay up!" is extremely disingenuous.

Re: MongoDB's Server Side Public License Is Likely Unenforceable

#126

Post by segmondy »

asien wrote: post #84

Remind me of that one time when they went berserk on every tooling vendor using the name « Mongo » in their product name : RoboMongo,MongoGUI etc... they all received a legal notice to remove the name mongo from their product. This was probably one of the most evil thing have seen in the open source industry . Most of those vendors were open source with paid premium features or donation. After receiving their legal n…

MongoDB is a profit company riding hard on the opensource bandwagon. This company is a publicly traded company, make no mistake about it. Profit over community. Every 3 months, they gotta report to Wall Street.

Re: MongoDB's Server Side Public License Is Likely Unenforceable

#127

Post by metheus »

Disclosure: I work for MongoDB. If you look at these two threads you'll find my comments in them, addressing similar concerns to those raised in this one.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18229452 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18229013

To reiterate those comments, the SSPL only affects people who are offering the licensed software to the public as a service. This does not include any software that uses MongoDB as a component, even if it's a commercial SaaS offering itself. The FAQ we put out here makes that clear: https://www.mongodb.com/licensing/server-side-public-license.... 99.999% of MongoDB users are not affected by this license change.

People have expressed concerns that the 1) the FAQ is not the license, and 2) the language of the license does not make the intended responsibility clear enough. But it was drafted with that intention (and reviewed by outside counsel, with an eye towards being explicit without giving bad actors loopholes to exploit). Nonetheless, addressing those concerns is extremely important to us. This exact issue is being discussed on the OSI license approval mailing list, and we are considering very seriously all of the feedback.

The article anchoring this thread contains a lengthy discussion of copyright misuse and of impracticability. Those are also the subjects of discussion on the OSI mailing list, where Heather Meeker, writing on MongoDB's behalf, refutes claims that are similar to those made in the article. In particular, the SSPL is not trying to make people release substrate infrastructure, or adjacent tooling, under the SSPL. Consider the last line of section 13: "...all such that a user could run an instance of the service using the Service Source Code you make available." This means that as long as the Service Source Code you release is enough for anyone to run the service, you've fulfilled your obligation. As an example, you would not have to somehow be able to offer CircleCI under the SSPL (an impossibility), as long as your tooling that orchestrates its use is public, because anyone can use CircleCI.

It's our hope that these discussions will lead to an accepted understanding of the actual obligations of the SSPL. The only people we want to be in any way affected by it are those who are literally offering the licensed software as a service, and we want those people to release their management stack under the SSPL. Thanks for helping us with that.

Re: MongoDB's Server Side Public License Is Likely Unenforceable

#128

Post by toyg »

jillesvangurp wrote: post #104
nicole_express wrote: post #35

As a non-lawyer who's tried to understand copyright law, this analysis confuses me; my understanding was that in the realm of source code "by default" you only have rights to use that source code through a license or contract, so it seems odd that any restriction on the terms would be misuse or detrimental to competition, when the option always exists to not use MongoDB. This isn't me trying to argue against the arti…

This uncertainty and confusion is by design and the whole point of this license. It's designed to make people who are not lawyers consider getting a commercial license just to avoid the potential for legal headaches that may or not materialize. I doubt it will work since many people will indeed not want to deal with companies that are dangling legal threats over their own users like this. IMHO there's no other way to…

It is actually silly, because being “the only unpaid open source nosql” is a pretty good position to be in. It’s how MySQL became huge: by being “the only unpaid open source relational db” good enough for real work.

It’s not with licensing shenanigans that they’ll fix a monetization failure; in fact, it will likely backfire. It’s hard enough to push (A)GPL software in enterprise contexts, by making it even more awkward they are basically begging users to go away.

Re: MongoDB's Server Side Public License Is Likely Unenforceable

#129

Post by thawkins »

greenshackle2 wrote: post #101
ninkendo wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a question about how derivative works are defined with respect to AGPL. With the GPL, you couldn't distribute software that links (at runtime) to GPL software, without open-sourcing your software as well. This is because, linking another piece of software to a GPL'd binary means you're creating a "derived work". That's why they made the LGPL (the "lesser" public license) which allows being linked to from close…

Runtime linking doesn't always equals derivative work. Some GPL enthusiasts would like it to be that way but it doesn't mean it is. As far as I know it's a murky legal issue. I forget the exact case but one counter-example was: you have proprietary library A. Someone makes a GPL implementation B with a compatible interface. You ship software C with instructions that users can use either library A or B. An example of…

Also the only part of mongo that is limked is the driver, not tbe database product. All the drivers are licened under apache 2 license, which is permissive, and largly just demands preservation of copyrigths and trademarks. It does not mandate source distribution for derived (linked) products.

Re: MongoDB's Server Side Public License Is Likely Unenforceable

#130

Post by macintux »

SOLAR_FIELDS wrote: post #119
chrisweekly wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

weary (tired) -> wary (concerned) not nit-picking, just attempting to help other readers who aren't native English speakers

For those that don’t know, they are sometimes pronounced the exact same, which is why they are often mixed up (see also affect and effect). Where I’m from weary is pronounced WEER-y though.

I hear "weary" spoken so very rarely that I have no idea how it's pronounced here (Indiana). I can't even make up my mind how I pronounce it, but I'd wager it's almost, but not quite, indistinguishable from wary.
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