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Comment by kstrauser | Hacker News Reader

PostgreSQL is used much more widely than MongoDB, and has a much freer license. Lots of people make money developing and supporting PostgreSQL.

I also content that MongoDB built their project on top of a mountain of Free Software. It rings a little hollow to me when they complain that others are making money from using their software, when the MongoDB team is also making money from using others' software. Last I checked, they weren't a major contributor to the Linux kernel, or GNU, or GCC, or Emacs/Vim, or...

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> Last I checked, they weren't a major contributor to the Linux kernel, or GNU, or GCC, or Emacs/Vim

MongoDB only needs the Linux kernel/GNU/GCC when it's running or compiling on Linux. On OSX and Windows it uses other toolchains.

And your point goes against the entire spirit of open source. No one should be forced to contribute back to open source less they be criticised by the community.

> MongoDB only needs the Linux kernel/GNU/GCC when it's running or compiling on Linux.

Good call. They should also be contributing back to those toolchains.

> No one should be forced to contribute back to open source less they be criticised by the community.

That right there is what we call irony. This is precisely what Mongo is trying to do.

That's not really what they're trying to do.

What they're trying to do is make it so challenging to host MongoDB as a service that cloud providers can't do it. They implemented it with an absurd requirement forcing contributions to open source, but the intent is not to improve open source, it's to end regain market control.

I totally agree. I’m convinced of it. The license shenanigans are just the means to that end.

So if I build an application on Linux I should be contributing back to Linux, GCC, Clang, CMake and the hundreds or thousands of libraries I use.

That makes absolutely no sense.

If you’re building your application on Linux and complaining that other make money off it (in accordance with your license), then yes, I absolutely expect that you better be supporting all the people whose work you’re building off of.

> ... Lots of people make money developing and supporting PostgreSQL.

Postgres is definitely an actively developed and very useful project, but I must admit I have no idea how the development is financed. It seems there is a non-profit collecting donations, for example EnterpriseDB seems to employ "key community members" [0]. And Amazon is listed among sponsors [1], though it is weird that they are so low on the list (from my limited experience most cloud use of Postgres is via RDS @ AWS).

So basically donations?

[0] https://www.enterprisedb.com/enterprisedb-community-particip... [1] https://appdevelopermagazine.com/why-citus-data-is--donating...

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