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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.
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.
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.