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This is a bad move and does not inspire confidence. Instead of switching the license, they should have gone after companies that were abusing the terms of GNU
by manishsharan 8y ago
This is a bad move and does not inspire confidence.
Instead of switching the license, they should have gone after companies that were abusing the terms of GNU AGPLv3 license.
- michaelcampbell 8y agoExactly; what makes them think changing the license is going to make an actor in bad faith change?
- nemo44x 8y agoHow would they litigate against a mega corporation? Mongo is a very small company compared to many cloud providers. They would be tied up in the courts for years and spend hundreds of millions and possibly drive the company into bankruptcy.
- antirez 8y agoTo legally fight in China pretending that something you can't see was modified is... hard. IMHO the only wrong thing about this move is trying to get it OSI approved, otherwise I can understand that they have concerns that do not apply to most normal users. However one should boldly say we are moving away from an OSS model, to a "available source" model where you retain most rights.
- kstrauser 8y agoHow is those going to affect China? If the old enforcement methods didn’t work with the previous sane-ish license, they certainly won’t work any better with the new monstrosity.
- antirez 8y agoNow you don't have to pretend that they changed something without having any way to prove it. Now if the orchestration software is not open source, they can't use it.
- mbreese 8y agoThey could just claim that their orchestration software is open-source (potentially w/o stating what it is), or just publish a stub set of scripts that plausibly work but that aren't actually used under the hood. I'm not sure this really makes things all that much clearer.
- kstrauser 8y agoI suspect you’re exactly right. There is literally no reason I’d use MongoDB anymore over any of its better FOSS competitors.
- christkv 8y agoYou can go after their western subsidiaries and thus keep them out of western markets
- kstrauser 8y agoHow does this change make that any easier. I’m asking genuinely.
- christkv 8y agoI guess they could get injunctions to shut them down in places like the eu and us (basically blocking them, or getting fines). I've no idea if this is easy or not but it could be used as a negotiation tactic (I'm guessing here) to negotiate a license deal.
- kstrauser 8y agoBut what I wonder is why it would be any more illegal to violate this license than the perfectly normal old one? And if it’s not, then why bother?
- christkv 8y agoI'm not a lawyer but my understanding is that the AGPL does not stop you from offering it as a service as it does not explicitly say you need to contribute back anything that is not direct modifications to the server source code. But that's just how I read it.
- stonogo 8y agoThis new license has language that allows the 'infringer' to pay their way out. This is a shorter path toward proving damages in a US court. This license is basically a litigation cannon being wheeled around to aim at people who are currently making the money that MongoDB wishes it were making.