I imagine they will now require copyright assignment or something like that for external contributors to be able to relicense new code under a commercial license.
The community did not like this one bit, but MongoDB doesn't need to care about what the community thinks because they had CLA'd all their contributors. That is, if you wanted something in MongoDB upstream, you had to give MongoDB full copyright ownership over the software. Which exempts them from copyleft[1]. One of the critical parts of copyleft is the "no further restrictions" rule; otherwise copyleft is just proprietary with extra steps.
[0] I don't remember if they were hosting MongoDB as part of RDS or something else.
[1] As we've seen with the Neo4J lawsuit, copyright licenses cannot tie the hands of the copyright owner. The only way for copyleft to work is to create a Mexican standoff of contributors who will sue each other to death if any one of them decides to relicense without unanimous community consensus.
Because once it was clear that software as a service was a compelling model, it was no longer appealing to give everyone the permissions needed to offer the software as part of a service (as AGPLv3 was always designed to do).
Changing the license seemingly worked, as a partnership was eventually announced [2].
[1] https://github.com/Tencent/CMONGO
[2] https://www.mongodb.com/company/newsroom/press-releases/tenc...
That’s an exaggeration. The vast majority of permissively licensed projects have never “rug pulled” and never will. It might be one possible reason to choose such a license but it’s very far from the only one.
A CLA often tries to mitigate this by making contributors give the project owners special rights at the time of contribution.
(Note that even if relicensed, this itself can never revoke licenses granted for prior versions unless that license specifically had revocation written into it.)
> there are open legal questions about whether the GPL and its variants are enforceable.
GPL v3 also has a nice clause that allows companies to "repair/cure" their non-compliance.
> Moreover, your license from a particular copyright holder is reinstated permanently if the copyright holder notifies you of the violation by some reasonable means, this is the first time you have received notice of violation of this License (for any work) from that copyright holder, and you cure the violation prior to 30 days after your receipt of the notice.
if that's your "good legal reason" to avoid the GPL, then it's just as much a "good legal reason" not to open source your work at all: if the GPL is not enforceable, that would mean you have used a non-copyleft license, which according to you is the thing you want to avoid for good legal reasons.
you said "avoid gpl". reason? "unenforceable". eliminating gpl from consideration, thus you advocate non-copyleft licenses instead.
with me so far?
but gpl's "unenforceability" could only mean it turns into a non-copyleft license, one which you say one should not use, so if one shouldn't use gpl because in reality it is a non-copyleft license, then you must be against non-copyleft licenses.
just to state it again for clarity: "don't use gpl because copyleft is unenforceable so gpl is just MIT underneath, and I repeat, don't use it" is a recommendation not to use MIT license.
Note that I don't agree that GPL and MIT are equivalent, or that GPL becomes a non-copyleft open source license if not enforceable. IANAL but it might revert to the regular copyright law for wherever you publish software, not an open source license.
(also, it is enforceable and has been enforced, but that's a separate topic.)
Amazon gets to make millions off of the thing you built.
"Equitable source" licenses with MAU / ARR limits, hyperscaler resale limits, and AGPL-like "entire stack must be open" clauses is the way to go. It's a "fuck you" to Amazon, Google, and Microsoft in particular and leaves you untouched.
Open source today is hyperscaler serfdom. Very few orgs are running Redis on bare metal, and a equitable source license can be made to always support the bare metal case.
If you're okay with that, that's cool. But they'll profit off of your work and labor. And the worst part is that at scale, the advantages of the sum total of open source is used to compete with you and put price pressure on your salary and career options. To rephrase that, the hyperscalers are in a position to leverage open source to take advantage of market opportunities you cannot, and they can use that to compete with your business or competing businesses that might otherwise pay you better.
Open source needs anti-Google/Amazon/Microsoft clauses.
Not everyone thinks infectious copyleft / free software is a problem. But it will mean that if you use AGPL3, every part of your stack has to be open. That doesn't work for everyone.
This is why "equitable source" / "fair source" is gaining traction. You can use a license like Apache and add in clauses with MAU/ARR/Hyperscaler limits that allows practically everyone else to use your software.
AGPLv3 says, if you modify the software and put it on a network, you have to provide a link for anyone accessing the software to download the modified source. There's numerous drafting and technical problems with this arrangement[0] but the only parts of your stack you have to release are the parts that are actually part of the program covered by AGPLv3.
The "strong copyleft" strategy[1] is to identify a specific freedom-restricting behavior we don't like and prohibit just that. We're not saying "Amazon is not allowed to use this software", we're saying "Anyone who turns this software into a service needs to provide a way to fork the service and get the software back without losing anything". If such a copyleft license happens to scare a company into buying license exceptions, that's a happy accident.
In contrast equitable source doesn't say anything about freedom, it just says "these people need to pay a license fee". That's not FOSS, that's shareware. In FOSS, free-riding is not a bug. The problem with AWS isn't that they aren't paying a license fee, it's that they are building roach motels out of community projects.
[0] I'd link to Hector Martin's incredibly informative Mastodon posts regarding the subject, but he deleted his account after crashing out of LKML. As a substitute for that, I'll summarize my hazy memories:
- The intended compliance mechanism is to make your app a quine; but that only makes sense for webapps written in PHP/Python/etc. Someone actually put AGPLv3 on an Ethernet stack - how do you comply with that?
- It's unclear how license compliance works in a pull request driven Git workflow. If you're running the server locally for testing, and someone accesses it, have you violated the license?
- You can filter out the source offer with an HTTP proxy not covered by AGPLv3. That seems like a very wide loophole which the FSF apparently believes would work.
[1] e.g. AGPL, SSPL, OpenWatcom, etc
AGPL does not and has not prevented hyperscalers from creating managed services for software licensed with it
That’s why mongo created the server side public license, which does require open sourcing the entire stack. MongoDB was AGPL before that
And yet somehow people keep making new projects under MIT license.