201–210 of 245 posts
Huh. So, the rush to release and announce the license before OSI vetted it, was in fact VERY VERY intentional. Not some poorly planned "rush the news out" mismanagement. And the recent stink on HN where OSI claimed MongoDB was not Open Source because the license had not yet been reviewed, with many claiming (correctly) that OSI is not the determiner of what is open source, appears to have been out of order. I think t…
Cloud computing is becoming the dominant model, and the current combination of OSS licenses and public cloud players/incentives make it nearly impossible for OSS companies to monetize in the cloud. While there are no perfect answers, we either need to come up with new licenses (difficult) or pursue a new approach to cloud (decentralization) that supports OSS monetization.
Am I missing something or is the author? Also, what stance has the 2nd Circuit taken on copyright misuse, if any?
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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…
Disclosure: I work for MongoDB. Forcing droves of community users to buy commercial licenses is not the intention of the SSPL -- indeed, it cannot serve that function, as it does not obligate them to do anything at all unless they are making the licensed software itself available to the public as a service.
I'd recommend sticking with well understood OSS licenses. There are plenty of those. This one is neither OSS (until the OSS foundation says otherwise) nor well understood. Both are problems. Especially when mixing with GPLed code. It creates all sorts of headaches. And conveniently your company's way to solve that is a commercial license. I'd still argue that that was the main point. I'd suggest celebrating any successful use of your software instead of trying to constrain it.
My suggestion would be to use Apache 2.0 and try to get companies to take a commercial license based on the merit of added value in terms of support, extra goodies, etc. This seems to work well for others in the industry (e.g. Elastic that recently IPOd); it's well understood; explicitly compatible with GPL; and has none of the disadvantage of rolling your own license.
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I think we're all on the same page about the shoddiness of being in the open source insurance business, but that is not what the SSPL is for, nor could it be used for that. We simply can't make the claim that any SaaS other than specifically MongoDB as a service derives primarily from MongoDB -- or rather, it it's possible to make the claim, but it's easier to defeat it.
The whole point of this discussion is that MongoDB, Inc could make that claim (as you agree)...and we as users of MongoDB will have to spend money fighting off that claim. You'd have to pretty naive to use software that has these terms.
It's obvious that several people disagree, but within this thread, conversing about this article, we should expect a bias to see things that way. I hope you'll stay open to being convinced otherwise. The SSPL has been submitted for review to the OSI, and this issue is one of the points of discussion that we're listening very closely to.
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This makes sense, and I believe you, but lawyers being lawyers, I don't think any corporate legal team is going to even bother with trying. Easier to say "no". Source: 1 data point; the company I work for's legal team just said "no".
Same fight here, but we're digging in our heels and bothering to convince the internal lawyer that it's not a problem. We'll win, but it takes time we'd rather not have to spend.
MongoDB of course has right to change their license to anything they want. One day they might decide to go proprietary with no notice too... According to our poll many users will seek alternatives for MongoDB because of the license change https://www.percona.com/blog/2018/10/24/poll-mongodb-license... MongoDB probably feels they have reached critical mass so it does not matter any more...
>MongoDB probably feels they have reached critical mass so it does not matter any more... They have become a new standard and they are aware of it. Just look at any bootcamps for devs this days , it’s basically always JS + MongoDB. Not Postgres or MySQL , Mongo. Mongo has become the new MySQL for a lot of devs these days. It’s often the only DBMS they know... These move is somewhat coherent with what others are doing…
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"offering a service the value of which entirely or primarily derives from the value of the Program" That sounds pretty squishy and likely to be broader than just the use case of offering Mongo as a service.
Yeah, that throws off huge “what would Oracle do” red flags.
> Imagine that the author is hired by a large evil corporation and, now in their thrall, attempts to do the worst to the users of the program: to make their lives miserable, to make them stop using the program, to expose them to legal liability, to make the program non-free, to discover their secrets, etc. The same can happen to a corporation bought out by a larger corporation bent on destroying free software in order to maintain its monopoly and extend its evil empire. The license cannot allow even the author to take away the required freedoms!
If MongoDB does not say in a legally binding way that this is clearly not what they mean, an acquirer could very likely twist the clause.
Yeah, I'm not necessarily opposed to the general spirit of what they're trying to do here, but this license just doesn't make sense in practice. Now that I've had more time to look at it, I'd really recommend that everybody stay the f%!# away from MongoDB. This bit in particular really hits the nail on the head: Let's assume that it is ok somehow to pass forward other open source software, solving that problem. What…
1. Big cloud vendors are making money off MongoDB's investment Completely untrue. The big three - AWS, Azure and GCP dont have a MongoDB as a service solution. The only commercial entity making any real money off MongoDB is MongoDB, Inc. AGPL has achieved its purpose here. The only big cloud vendor with a solution is Rackspace and they release their modified MongoDB code.
2. Big cloud Vendors in China are breaking the law and they need this new license to control them If they are technically modifying the source code and not providing it back to the community then they are already breaking the law. You don't need a new license to control this problem
So what is this about? In my opinion it is an exercise in naked extortion and control
1. Clear out any ISV Vendors/As-a-service Competitors - Any commerical entity who does anything remotely interesting with MongoDB is in big trouble. I'm talking about Monitoring, backup, performance profiling, analytics, reporting etc..anything really. MongoDB could easily bring a reasonable claim against them that the value of their service is "primarily or mostly derived from MongoDB". Also its very unclear on what needs to be open sourced to be compatible. The license seems deliberately vaguely worded so that it is as broad as possible.
2. End users using MongoDB - While MongoDB claims this does not affect end users in any way I would be very wary of this claim. The license in authored in such a generic way that there are many possible interpretations. If MongoDB, Inc for some reason does a claim against you then your only defence is to buy a license or go into litigation. "Trust us, we will never do that" is not a good enough argument.
To summarize, be very wary of this. If you are a developer and dont think this affects you run this by your legal deparment or VC and see the alarm on their faces :)