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Amazon was using MongoDB without paying for it.

Do you have a citation for that? AGPL is usually not considered business friendly or a corporate "allowed by default" license, even for internal use.

Contrary to the headline and articles inference I havent seen any indication that MongoDB source or IP is or was actually being used. As you note this all comes down to API compatibility and tangled notions of "proprietary" slash copyright.

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Yep. AGPL is explicitly forbidden within Amazon, even for non-customer-facing use, and their open source license lawyers are very twitchy about it.

For some reason I had the mistaken belief that Amazon was offering a curated MongoDB-in-the-cloud service on their platform in the past - before the DocumentDB announcement and API compat. I think this was confusion with Redis.

But then there's even less reason to attack Amazon.

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