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.

Re:Open source monetization

[lsllll]

When I read the start of your comment, "Emacs", I thought you were offering an obvious alternative to MongoDB!

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.

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.

This is why we need diversity in open source.

[xack]

So one vendor can't make an "evil" license with vendor lock-in. I expect systemD and chromium will be the next projects to do something like this. And before you say fork, i say spoon.

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.

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.

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.

I don't know where my sympathy could lie...

[HerculesMO]

AWS has been historically ripping off open source projects, forking them, and building new products without any attribution or support. The premise that they are the best cloud provider is kind of tainted to me, since they aren't building anything from scratch but rather, taking the work of thousands of volunteers and incorporating it into a paid for service. Examples would be in addition to DocumentDB (an ironic name since Azure called their NoSQL offering that first), Redshift, Maria, and even their hypervisor.

Then you have Mongo who builds a product and markets it like it's the cure to cancer, and early on had a lot of success in convincing people they needed it (they mostly don't -- read up about Diaspora when you find time). Now that they are in the position of being outed for their proprietary connection interface (which is what makes AWS offerings compatible) they are changing the licensing. I don't think Red Hat's move hurts them as much as people don't want to maintain a fucking Mongo cluster any more.

So who do I feel sorry for? Fuck both of them. Azure and GCP are better cloud providers anyway -- Azure for the enterprise, GCP for 'startups' that don't need the enterprise tooling. If you start your business on AWS it's because you ride the bandwagon either have enough money to burn, or are stupid.