What does "switches up" mean?
MongoDB switches up its open source license
331–340 of 487 posts
Re: MongoDB switches up its open source license
#332Earlier quoted context omitted.
You will find that RMS detests "Open Source"[1]. He's more of a Free software guy, the distinction on user's freedom is important. 1. https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/open-source-misses-the-point....
RMS has an ideal: All software should be free and open. This doesn't work for businesses that need to profit from what they do. Keeping things proprietary, while benefiting from source-available software is impossible if a company has to release their source. Competition goes out the window. So while RMS has a nice ideal, it doesn't generally apply.
> " Keeping things proprietary, while benefiting from source-available software is impossible"
That's a tragedy of the commons, not something any company is entitled to (BSD-style licenses excepted). Enjoying the benefits of an ecosystem while not contributing to it is not a thing to laud.
> So while RMS has a nice ideal, it doesn't generally apply.
...and here we are, with a MongoDB pulling a bait-and-switch on licensing because they want to have their cake and eat it. You shouldn't expect to only get the kudos (and higher adoption rate) that result from your open-source license and not run the risk of someone (possibly a competitor) forking your code. That is the price of admission into the open-source world.
Re: MongoDB switches up its open source license
#333Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's a fine interpretation of the term for amateurs. By which I mean, it's probably fine to think of things that way when you're working in an amateur capacity. If you're working in a non-amateur capacity, thinking about things that way could result in unwittingly exposing yourself to more legal risk than you want.
I don't think simply checking that the license is "OSI approved" gives you many legal guarantees. There are currently 83 "OSI approved" licenses containing a variety of terms, from aggressively copyleft to extremely permissive: https://opensource.org/licenses/alphabetical
I don't either. . . we might be playing a game of moving goalposts here. I was specifically responding to the observation that, "Open source for most people means whether you can see and modify the source code.", and saying that that, while that is a workable definition, it's probably not one that most people want to use.
Re: MongoDB switches up its open source license
#334Earlier quoted context omitted.
> We need to stop demonizing restrictionless development. I'm not! I love permissive OSS licenses, I think they're great until they get abused. What I'm demonizing is overly powerful megacorps owning an unreasonable amount of the available "tech" revenue. This license from MongoDB is an unfortunate side effect of that. I don't think anyone there wanted a weirdly restrictive license, but I do think they want to build…
> I think they're great until they get abused. I think they're great even when they get "abused" (for that definition of "abuse" which I don't agree with). > What I'm demonizing is overly powerful megacorps owning an unreasonable amount of the available "tech" revenue. Whether or not that is a problem is a different discussion, but suffice to say the license change will not solve or change that. It is naive to think…
I'm not sure what you think I'm arguing, but I also don't think the license change will solve problems for MongoDB. That they had to change their licensing so drastically is a symptom of a much larger problem.
> Calling them "megacorps", saying they are the problem, saying you have no choice but to change your license, etc all of this is what I mean about the ill-perceived righteousness of license restrictions.
They _are_ megacorps. It's ok to be fine with megacorps, but it's a little silly to pretend they're not.
They are a problem (you can disagree with this). We'd be better off with 20 smaller companies than one large Google. More innovation, less barriers to competing, etc, etc. It's not really righteousness, righteousness is more a moral stance than an "oh shit this is a bad state we're in".
Re: MongoDB switches up its open source license
#335Does MongoDB still suffer from data loss related issues? I checked out their website and it seems to be fairly ubiquitous in usage
Re: MongoDB switches up its open source license
#336Earlier quoted context omitted.
The OSI encourages and supports all people and organisations to profit from free and open source software. The ability to do so is enshrined in Item 6 of the Open Source Definition: https://opensource.org/osd-annotated The Open Source Definition provides a single point of reference for what it means for a project to be "open source." Licenses are submitted for approval by those who wish to prove that the license prov…
Sure, but here you are saying: 1. "Licences that conform to the OSD are open source". Agreed. 2. "Licences that do not conform to the OSD are not open source". Ok, let's run with that for now. That is not what you said upthread. You said "MongoDB is under a non-approved license and therefore IS NOT OPEN SOURCE". Nope. Even for those who accept the OSD as the sole definition of open source, you haven't yet established…
Using basic context clues and inference, it's obvious she meant "IS NOT OPEN SOURCE [currently]". The license has not been approved as open source. It may be eventually, but it is not at present.
Re: MongoDB switches up its open source license
#337Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sure, but here you are saying: 1. "Licences that conform to the OSD are open source". Agreed. 2. "Licences that do not conform to the OSD are not open source". Ok, let's run with that for now. That is not what you said upthread. You said "MongoDB is under a non-approved license and therefore IS NOT OPEN SOURCE". Nope. Even for those who accept the OSD as the sole definition of open source, you haven't yet established…
Using basic context clues and inference, it's obvious she meant "IS NOT OPEN SOURCE [currently]". The license has not been approved as open source. It may be eventually, but it is not at present.
No. She's conflating "an OSI-approved licence" with "open source". The Open Source Definition does not contain a requirement that a licence must be OSI-approved.
Re: MongoDB switches up its open source license
#338Earlier quoted context omitted.
> For me it's actually the definition of open source, having the sources in the open. But that's not actually the most commonly accepted definition of open source. It means something else, as widely understood by the software community.
My definition is the same as his. Is there a poll or survey somewhere that determined what the commonly accepted definition was?
Well, there's this thing called the OSI [1], and they have this definition that's been around for a while. From their website:
> The “open source” label was created at a strategy session held on February 3rd, 1998 in Palo Alto, California. That same month, the OSI was founded.
Re: MongoDB switches up its open source license
#339Earlier quoted context omitted.
So, yes, technically, OSI does not own the term open source, and it could be that this license does comply with everything set out in the Open Source Definition ( https://opensource.org/osd ), and that means that, technically, "(the latest version of) MongoDB is not open source" is overstating the case. Except that, as a non-lawyer developer who generally agrees with the Open Source Definition, "under an OSI-approved…
Open source for most people means whether you can see and modify the source code. Not whether OSI gives it some arbitrary stamp of approval.
Whether or not it's OSI approved or not isn't relevant, but if it doesn't meet their definition or something similar (https://opensource.org/osd) then it probably isn't what most of us would call open source.
How about I create a license called the ABA (anyone but amazon) license. If you're not Amazon/AWS/a subsidiary, it's just the MIT license. If you are, then you have no rights to use the software. Would you call that an open source license? I wouldn't. An important point (I thought) of open source was that the rules are the same for all, whether you're using it for personal projects or the biggest business on earth, whether you charge money for it or do it for free.
Re: MongoDB switches up its open source license
#340Vice President of the Open Source Initiative here. MongoDB submitted this new license for approval by OSI at the same time that they announced that they'd relicensed all of their code. We wish they'd started the process prior to the announcement, but what's done is done. The result, however, is that at this moment, MongoDB is under a non-approved license and therefore IS NOT OPEN SOURCE. As the license review process…
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