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…
>Copyleft is one thing, but this is so invasive and byzantine that it beggars belief that anybody actually thought this license made sense. It makes complete sense if its purpose is to be so onerous that no one can actually use it without a commercial license.
MongoDB's Server Side Public License Is Likely Unenforceable
221–230 of 245 posts
Re: MongoDB's Server Side Public License Is Likely Unenforceable
#222Huh. 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…
Re: MongoDB's Server Side Public License Is Likely Unenforceable
#223Yeah, 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…
Because of its previous license, the code base can be forked as of immediately before the license change, and it can continue to be offered under the previous license.
I would recommend that anyone using MongoDB do that.
Re: MongoDB's Server Side Public License Is Likely Unenforceable
#224Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Re: MongoDB's Server Side Public License Is Likely Unenforceable
#225Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Sorry, let me clarify. It's always possible to claim anything. I meant that the claim is too weak for the SSPL to create that threat. 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…
Re: MongoDB's Server Side Public License Is Likely Unenforceable
#226Remind 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…
I have absolutely no problem with trademarks as long as they're used as consumer protection. For example, there's the whole uBlock vs uBlock Origin thing, where uBlock Origin is the good one run by the original maintainer, and uBlock is run by people who had nothing to do with the original project. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UBlock_Origin Trademarks can be used offensively, and few cases were more offensive than t…
Re: MongoDB's Server Side Public License Is Likely Unenforceable
#227It's clear that there's a gap in existing licences that some regard as unfair. It also seems plausible that many projects could have dramatically better resources if the companies they are attached to could find a way to capture a fraction of their product's worth to their largest users. Just offering service with their competitive advantage being only the result of name recognition seems to work only for a very select group of huge projects. And even there, the likes of Canonical or SUSE show how hard it is.
Yet it is obviously challenging to write a license that adequately captures these facts. I think everyone would have something to gain from finding a way to make these situations work.
A required part of that solution may be for the community to interpret licenses not with the current they-are-trying-to-screw-us mindset but with, say, the "reasonable person" standard often used by the courts in contract/license disputes.
That's not going to be easy, considering "expect the worst and don't risk anything" always looks like sound advice, given that you will never know what you missed on the path not taken.
But the GPL's success should be inspiring here: it was initially met with scepticism, especially among corporate lawyers. Their essential pessimism never changed (it's how they became corporate lawyers in the firs place). But as it happened, it was enough for just few to take the risk, and subsequently creating precedents in court affirming the GPL, that made the concept cross the chasm to being palatable even to initial sceptics. Once courts fill in the questions of interpretation currently clouding these (necessarily somewhat abstract) licence, some doubts may dissipate.
Re: MongoDB's Server Side Public License Is Likely Unenforceable
#228Earlier quoted context omitted.
I have absolutely no problem with trademarks as long as they're used as consumer protection. For example, there's the whole uBlock vs uBlock Origin thing, where uBlock Origin is the good one run by the original maintainer, and uBlock is run by people who had nothing to do with the original project. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UBlock_Origin Trademarks can be used offensively, and few cases were more offensive than t…
It often seems like trademark lawyers must be fairly dim, as a lot of things confuse them that don't confuse anybody else.
What you should consider in your rage against trademarks is that they protect something far weaker than copyrights and patents. Trademarks are fundamentally exchangeable identifiers. They do not hold any value beyond what they are infused with due to their attachment to some company (person/organisation/...). Unlike patents, which cordon off the part of scientific reality from most, or copyright, which fundamentally relies on deadweight losses to make its mechanism work, trademarks are almost exclusively positive: there is nothing you gain from calling your product "Mongo-X" apart from the meaning the term carries based on the company creating the product.
(This slightly glosses over some practicalities, such as some terms having meaning before being adopted as a trademark, or the possible depletion of combinations of letters that can be pronounced. But those are just superficial practicalities, and they are acknowledged in various limits to trademarks).
Re: MongoDB's Server Side Public License Is Likely Unenforceable
#229Remind 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…
I fully expect them to flame out in the next couple of years.
Re: MongoDB's Server Side Public License Is Likely Unenforceable
#230Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Just look at any bootcamps for devs this days , it’s basically always JS + MongoDB. Not Postgres or MySQL , Mongo. The online classes love Firebase. :-D But yeah, I had to explain to a bootcamp dev a few weeks ago what Postgres was. I felt rather sad.
I am a bootcamp dev (still in it) and I can confirm that its all node + mongo. I know what postgres is but obviously dont know anything about it technically. I am struggling to understand what this license change means for someone like myself who is building a web app with mongo...
The general risk with any for profit open source company is either them pulling all the good features into the paid version, or suddenly changing your license so that closed source projects have to either stay on the old versions or pay for a commercial license.