MongoDB's Server Side Public License Is Likely Unenforceable

GPL steers clear of non-derived work. If you use VMWare on Linux, VMWare is not a derived work as far as copyright law is concerned and there is no relation between them as far as GPL is concerned.

This SSPL, is another story.

You're in the right ballpark, for sure, but the SSPL addresses the difference explicitly. I'll use your example of Tumblr to clarify.

Tumblr is built on some component technologies, like a database, an app framework, operating systems, backup systems, load balancing, etc. But Tumblr itself is not any of those things. Nor does it make any of its component technologies available to the public as a service. You cannot pay Tumblr to backup your servers, or to rent you VMs running an OS, or to do load balancing for your infrastructure. Even if every single one of those components were licensed under the SSPL, Tumblr would not have to release a single line of their code under the SSPL, because they provide something else -- a publishing platform.

MongoDB does not release the stack for Atlas, our SaaS. That's possible because we own the copyright to the source code -- we don't have to issue the software to ourselves.

The blog post we published announcing the change covers this, as well as our motivations and expectations in a lot of detail:

https://www.mongodb.com/blog/post/mongodb-now-released-under...

...while the license itself absolutely does not. I can read the GPL and tell what's expected of me, but I have no idea how to interpret clauses like:

> Making the functionality of the Program or modified version available to third parties as a service includes, without limitation, enabling third parties to interact with the functionality of the Program or modified version remotely through a computer network,

Explicitly calls out allowing users to access MongoDB.

> offering a service the value of which entirely or primarily derives from the value of the Program or modified version,

Explicitly calls out interacting with MongoDB. My company's website is basically a wrapper around accepting a query from a user, converting that into the appropriate NoSQL query, reformatting the result, and presenting it to the users. Since our web server is more or less an abstraction layer from the underlying database, it sounds like our whole website would be subject to the new terms.

> or offering a service that accomplishes for users the primary purpose of the Software or modified version.

Does not explicitly mention MongoDB, except by contrast implying that if we offer a service - even one not MongoDB-based - that accomplishes the primary purpose of MongoDB or a fork of it, then we're subject to the new terms.

FAQ be damned, it's the license itself that's clear as mud.

> 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.

Engineer to engineer, do you understand why so many of us find this uniquely onerous?