Red Hat Rejects MongoDB's 'Discriminatory' Server Side Public License (zdnet.com)

An anonymous reader quotes ZDNet: MongoDB is an open-source document NoSQL database with a problem. While very popular, cloud companies, such as Amazon Web Services (AWS), IBM Cloud, Scalegrid, and ObjectRocket has profited from it by offering it as a service while MongoDB Inc. hasn't been able to monetize it to the same degree. MongoDB's answer? Relicense the program under its new Server Side Public License (SSPL).

Open-source powerhouse Red Hat's reaction? Drop MongoDB from Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8. Red Hat's Technical and Community Outreach Program Manager Tom Callaway explained, in a note stating MongoDB is being removed from Fedora Linux, that "It is the belief of Fedora that the SSPL is intentionally crafted to be aggressively discriminatory towards a specific class of users." Debian Linux had already dropped MongoDB from its distribution....

The business point behind MongoDB's license change is to force cloud companies to use one of MongoDB's commercial cloud offerings. This hasn't worked either. AWS just launched DocumentDB, a database, which "is designed to be compatible with your existing MongoDB applications and tools," wrote AWS evangelist Jeff Barr.

Comments

Red Hat was bought by IBM

[Anonymous Coward]

Who cares? What system administrator cares what their says operating system in terms of databases?

From the article:

The business point behind MongoDB's license change is to force cloud companies to use one of MongoDB's commercial cloud offerings. This hasn't worked either.

No, the business point was to prevent companies like Amazon from hosting MongoDB [theoretically] as-is, like they do with other products like Kafka and Elasticsearch, which have subtle changes and limitations compared to self-hosted instances, but they are largely good enough. In the case of AWS, they were apparently successful enough to force AWS to host a database with a MongoDB-compatible API rather than actually hosting a modified copy of MongoDB's code.

The obvious hope of that situation was that this would prevent those companies (AWS, IBM, Microsoft Azure, etc) from hosting compatible-enough layers, but that has proven unsuccessful with AWS' announcement (as well as CosmosDB on Azure, which was announced awhile before the license change and is closer to AWS DocumentDB than MongoDB).

As an open source developer and fan, I do not understand the hate toward MongoDB's move. It is not exactly an attractive move, but their hands have been forced by the likes of AWS and Azure taking without giving back. They've developed a successful, large business around their database. But because it's open source, Azure and AWS are going to get the lion share of profits without giving back a line of code.

Re:Red Hat was bought by IBM

[Desler]

Then MongoDB should have been charging from the beginning if they wanted to be paid. Also, you can get RHEL essentially free with CentOS just without any support.

So again, MongoDB should have used a proprietary license from the get go instead of using a GPL license where one of the terms of that "free software" license is:

Freedom 0: The freedom to run the program for any purpose.

MongoDB doesn't just get to ride the coattails of free software when they like but when people use the software in full compliance to both the spirit and letter of the license then start complaining.

Both parties made a good point. All fine now.

[ffkom]

So MongoDB Inc. says they want to have money from companies that host sell the service of of hosting their database for others, and those companies say "thanks, but no thanks, we'll rather use a different database, then".

That's a very simple decision both parties have the right to take, and it's all good now.

I remember when the company I work for had to decide whether to use RHEL or another Linux distribution, and since we deemed RHEL way too expensive for the little added value they offer, we went on to use CentOS (on thousands of machines). That was a similar situation where seller and potential buyer concluded their respective valuations were just too different for a deal.

Re:ScyllaDB's CEO has the best take on it

[Desler]

AWS is not breaking any rules here, but folks need to seriously look at it from a long term sustainability model and not necessarily go with AWS.

So they are not violating the license at all, but AWS is bad because reasons? It's not the fault of AWS that the Mongo people have no way to make money off their product. If Mongo needed money they shouldn't have released it under the very free software terms that allowed AWS to use so freely.

Seems they should have released the product product under a proprietary license if they wanted to exert all this control. But by doing that Mongo would have lost all the phoney marketing about how they are this great open source company.

Re:Open source monetization

[squiggleslash]

This has worked for RedHat and other enterprise oriented companies with their support contract offerings. It also worked nice for existing companies -- including even Microsoft -- which uses open source partially. However if you only have a single offering, like MongoDB the situation was not as clear.

Now go through that sentence and replace "MongoDB" with literally any open source/free software project, from GCC to KDE, and you'll see the problem with it. Indeed, just restricting yourself to DBMSes from MySQL to PostgreSQL still shows that it doesn't hold up. MongoDB could rely upon contributions and maintenance from interested parties, including donations of code from parties dedicated to MongoDB via consultancy, software aggregators like RedHat, projects that use MongoDB like... uh, whoever does, and so on.

But it doesn't, and instead it goes for a "It's free (libre & gratis) until you use it" model, which just plain isn't going to work for any other company in the free software and open source communities.

I understand the concerns. But the "solution" they're talking about doesn't work with the needs of the rest of the community even if it appears to help them, so while they adopt it, they can't really expect the rest of the community to contribute to and support their project.