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

Open source monetization

[stikves]

There has been more discussions about monetization of open source projects. While coding as a hobby and helping projects as a philanthropy work is very good, long term stable projects need continuous funding.

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.

And it is not AWS's fault that they don't want to pay per-seat licensing fees: https://www.techrepublic.com/a...

Re:Open source monetization

[Luthair]

For GCC don't vendors (Intel, AMD, ARM) commonly contribute? Depending on how key their contributions are to GCC one might be able to make the argument that selling CPUs is the money maker.

ScyllaDB's CEO has the best take on it

[MikeRT]

Source

On the surface, the intention is good and clear, the following two types of OSS usage will be handled fairly well:

        Valid OSS internal usage
        A company, let’s call it CatWalkingStartup, uses MongoDB OSS to store cat walking paths. It’s definitely not a MongoDB competitor and not a database service, thus a valid use of the license.
        MongoDB as a service usage
        A company, let’s call it BetterBiggerCloud, offers MongoDB as a service without contributing back a single line of code. This is not a valid use according to SSPL. In such a case, BetterBiggerCloud will either need to pay for an Enterprise license or open all of their code base (which is less likely to happen).

Here’s where things get complicated. Let’s imagine the usage of a hypothetical company like a Twilio or a PubNub (these are just presented for example, this is not to assert whether they do or ever have used MongoDB). Imagine they use MongoDB and provide APIs on top of their core service. Would this be considered a fair usage? They do provide a service and make money by using database APIs and offering additional/different APIs on top of it. At what point is the implementation far enough from the original?

Fair and balanced take, overall. Even sympathizes with why Mongo did it, even if not in agreement with the ultimate decision.

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.