Absolutely. This license change takes it completely out of the contention for anything I would have previously considered it for. Can you imagine if Nginx said you had to release any software you run behind it as FOSS?
I can fully understand the frustration of pro-copyleft developers and companies that want to use copyleft for a 'share or pay model'. Cloud computing makes existing licenses toothless by moving the software from the client to the server, thereby avoiding distribution. It can be argued that such use is not in the spirit of copyleft and is effectively a loophole from the perspective of copyleft licensing.
It is not surprising that people try to make new copyleft licenses that fill that loophole. This may not be the best formulation, but it is definitely much better than the Commons Clause nonsense that was hyped a couple of weeks ago (which makes software proprietary).
[1] Whether it is enforceable is another issue.
I’m unsympathetic to the “oh no the cloud” mindset. I’ve worked at companies that have made on-premise patches to FOSS since the 90s. Can you imagine if Linux required you to make the source available of all software you ran on it? Or MySQL? Or Perl/PHP? I can vaguely see the point of the AGPL for things like web front end stuff where there’s a blurry line between you visitor merely visiting your site and you distributing the software to them. But that’s just madness for infrastructure code.
And I’ll bet that the MongoDB team has used lots of FOSS that they didn’t financially support, so I see it as whining when they complain about others doing the same.
It's perfectly understandable if you decide not to use their software because you find their license unacceptable but don't insult them for doing what they want with their own project. If a sizeable enough number of contributors are unhappy with the move they're still free to fork and continue the previous version of Mongo DB with the old license.
I think it’s either:
- Idiotic, because they meant well but managed to shoot themselves in the foot by making their software unviable, or
- Malevolent, because they’re using this as a wedge to either force you into a pay-or-lose-it situation, while still trying to paint themselves as FOSS.
You’re free to change your licenses (or not), just as other projects are (but should).
It’s time the free ride and expectations of charity by for-profit users ends.
You say "freeloading". I say "participating in a rich culture of shared work". Maybe I don't contribute all my local work to Emacs upstream, but I push out a lot of Python stuff. Maybe you don't bother sharing all the Python tweaks you've made, but you're an active Vim contributor. Perhaps there's someone else that's a Vim "freeloader" but who cranks out a lot of kernel code that you and I both benefit from. I think that's a healthy, mutually-beneficial arrangement.
It’s clearly not mutually beneficial when one side is reaping outsized rewards (and not at all ashamed about it), and your example of small contributions to vim and python is disingenuous; we’re talking about entire software packages used without compensation by businesses (Redis, Elastic, Mongo to name a few).
If Mongo were a closed, proprietary product who wanted to be paid, sure. I happily pay for Apple stuff, for instance. But saying "hey, come use our FOSS project!" and then pivoting to "...as long as you pay up!" is extremely disingenuous.
This is absolutely no different than commercial vendors who change pricing or licensing terms year to year (ie “we no longer offer an on prem version; SaaS only now; last year you paid $100k, this year our price is $200k”). You’ve just been anchored to an unusually low price previously.
MongoDB is little more than mmap() attached to a socket. They would be nowhere without piggybacking on a million lines of other people’s free code.
> ...
> [1]Whether it is enforceable is another issue.
As per the article, apparently not. Copyright Misuse [1] will stop them setting terms beyond a certain scope. You could argue that that merely makes the licence unenforceable but by that definition the only thing worth talking about is enforceability, so that doesn't seem like a good definition as there are practical enforceability issues to separately consider
> If you dislike the license, then use a different program
That's exactly what he said he would do, isn't it?