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(Context: I worked on Compose/MongoHQ for a very long time. We were the first to monetize MongoDB) I'm sure people will get riled up about this, but it makes s

by mrkurt 8y ago

(Context: I worked on Compose/MongoHQ for a very long time. We were the first to monetize MongoDB) I'm sure people will get riled up about this, but it makes sense. Building a business on an OSS database in a world of behemoth cloud providers is really hard. It's clear Google and Amazon (and maybe even Azure) are comfy taking OSS work, doing a ton of proprietary development on it, and leaving the companies who did all the groundwork flailing in the wind. These things are going to keep happening as long as mega tech companies (a) use OSS to commoditize other companies' products and (b) exploit permissive licenses to the max. I don't want to live in a world where the only infrastructure software we have access to is what the big companies deign to open source. Life is better when small groups of devs can build and sustain critical infrastructure software. We need more haproxies and redises and binds and (fill in blank). That said, MongoDB has never figured out how to work with their ecosystem in a way that's good for everyone. They've gone from trying to extort money from smaller companies to undercutting them to this. And it's likely not gonna change much this time, the world of "run a database as a service" is changing I think, and being replaced with more generic tools that just so happen to manage complex persistence well. _Also_ I bet some random licensing folks are crapping their pants at IBM right now. I'm ashamed at how funny that is.

oropolo 8y ago
> It's clear Google and Amazon (and maybe even Azure) are comfy taking OSS work, doing a ton of proprietary development on it, and leaving the companies who did all the groundwork flailing in the wind. Have you seen the degree of investment Microsoft has made lately in Open Source? It's an upside-down world where Microsoft if a bigger champion -- and funder -- of open source than a company like Google which was built on Open Source software.
- DannyBee 8y ago
  Here, i'll make a provocative statement: Google has released roughly every meaningful patch it has made to the open source software it was built on[1]. As for funding, that's definitely not true by the numbers last i looked (and definitely was not true in the past). Without concrete disagreements, this is just handwaving. So if you make some, i'm happy to argue with real data. [1] The only cases i can think of that this isn't true is when the Googler who worked on it left before they got a chance to do that (and nobody has picked it up since)
  - lacker 8y ago
    Google has released roughly every meaningful patch it has made to the open source software it was built on. Chrome or Android seem like good counterexamples, where the software that most people use (Chrome, or Android + Google Experience) is specifically kept in two separate buckets, open source and closed source, so that Google can strategically keep some parts open and some parts closed.
    - DannyBee 8y ago
      Err? They are certainly not useful counterexamples. That is open source software Google made itself. The original complaint was about taking other people's open source (mongodb) without contributing back. Not "failing to release stuff it made itself". That's a completely different thing. Even there, what i said is still true: Google has released every meaningful patch to the open source software it used in making Chrome/Android.
  - darkarmani 8y ago
    At least 10 years ago, i thought google had a lot of custom linux kernel patches that weren't public.
    - DannyBee 8y ago
      For production server kernel: The only kernel patches these days i'm aware of that aren't upstream are hardware drivers for very custom hardware, or ones we released but upstream didn't want and we still maintain. Like any sane kernel team, google tries to minimize it's difference with upstream since it has huge maintenance cost.
- mrkurt 8y ago
  Yeah! It's weird, MS seems pretty well behaved. But they also offer stuff like this, I doubt Salvatore is seeing much benefit: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/cache/ https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/cache/
- gigatexal 8y ago
  But the companies that shepherd and develop the open source software and let the community use it for free has to be supported somehow. So unless the cloud companies want to fund these companies and thereby fund the developers of the open source software directly then these kinds of licenses make sense.
- super3 8y ago
  The total cloud market is around $180B. 90% are on running Linux, and 2/3 are running on OSS. If it is not in the billions its not enough.
  - golubbe 8y ago
    To put that $180B in perspective, the TOTAL revenue of the public OSS companies (or those that were public recently before being acquired) is roughly $5B. That includes Red Hat, Mongo, Cloudera, Hortonworks, Elastic, and Mulesoft. If 2/3 of a $180B market is driven by open source, and we want the cycle of innovation to continue, it's in everyone's best interest to find ways to connect open source cloud usage to direct open source monetization.
- Twirrim 8y ago
  Amazon also spends a lot of time and effort on Open Source software, including the Linux kernel. They also contribute money to various open source foundations and target funding for various groups like OpenSSL. Microsoft gets all the news because it's a drastic change from normal behaviour. Amazon, Google, Oracle et all just keep steadily contributing stuff. A lot of the work is also deadly boring and not headline capturing stuff. Few simple queries to show the work they're doing just on the kernel: Amazon: https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/log/?id=07d981ad4cf1e78361c6db1c28ee5ba105f96cc1&qt=author&q=amazon.co https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/lin... Google: https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/log/?id=07d981ad4cf1e78361c6db1c28ee5ba105f96cc1&qt=author&q=google.co https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/lin... Microsoft: https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/log/?id=07d981ad4cf1e78361c6db1c28ee5ba105f96cc1&qt=author&q=microsoft.co https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/lin... Oracle: https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/log/?id=07d981ad4cf1e78361c6db1c28ee5ba105f96cc1&qt=author&q=oracle.com https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/lin...
- yarrel 8y ago
  The foxes purchasing the henhouse isn't them championing chickens...
babuskov 8y ago
> exploit permissive licenses to the max I feel like many people deciding to use an open source license for their project never consider the consequences of such choice. They use OSS because it's "cool" or they hope to get some free work done for them. If you pick an open source license and someone uses your code to build something else within the license boundaries, that is not a Bad Thing(tm). I have released many open source projects under MIT and GPL licenses and I have no problem with anyone repackaging it however they please, as long as they respect the license terms. On the other hand, when I pick an OSS software to build upon, I pick it exactly because of the license and plan to use the license to the extent it is allowed. If the license doesn't look like a good fit, I use something else or write my own code. I don't feel like Google/Amazon/etc. owe anything to anyone just because they made it and now have a lot of money.
- gshulegaard 8y ago
  I generally agree with you. I just wanted to point out that from an Economic perspective this: > I don't feel like Google/Amazon/etc. owe anything to anyone just because they made it and now have a lot of money. And the ability to utilize that war chest to cannibalize the best of open source to create private differentiators raises the barrier of entry for competition. This market would naturally drift towards an oligopoly-like market equilibrium. Like I said, I agree with your perspective on licenses. I would just also like OSS to be the great equalizer that instills innovation and disruption in the greater tech market place. But so long as tech giants can take any good new OSS, pay top dollar to recruit great engineers, and then throw them at OSS then I don't think this ideal vision will come to fruition.
  - nickpsecurity 8y ago
    Ill add patent trolling and copyright issues like API ruling to what you said. The companies with money can pay bribes to weaken or block FOSS activity in varios ways. Better if OSS/FOSS companies have business models with money to fight that.
- setgree 8y ago
  > I feel like many people deciding to use an open source license for their project never consider the consequences of such choice I might say instead that the norms of open source software development -- attribution, collaboration, good faith -- are so baked in to small, high-trust communities that they might seem as though they'll be obvious to everyone. And then your software makes it way to the public and you realize that those were just assumptions and not written into the letter of agreement at any point. I'm speaking as an outside observer on this.
DannyBee 8y ago
"I'm sure people will get riled up about this, but it makes sense. Building a business on an OSS database in a world of behemoth cloud providers is really hard. It's clear Google and Amazon (and maybe even Azure) are comfy taking OSS work, doing a ton of proprietary development on it, and leaving the companies who did all the groundwork flailing in the wind. " This is simply not true in any meaningful way. Please cite real data. It's very hard to disagree with handwaving like this. Both Google's official policy (which is super clear about this: https://opensource.google.com/docs/ https://opensource.google.com/docs/), and practice (releasing and working on tens of thousands of open source projects) say otherwise. I would love to see the data that goes with this claim.
- wmf 8y ago
  It seems like even if the cloud providers contributed 100% of their code back to Mongo it still wouldn't be enough to keep Mongo alive. They need money, not code. That's the subtext to this whole discussion. AGPL was a roundabout way of hinting that cloud providers should kick back some revenue and now that it didn't work the truth can come out.
  - sangnoir 8y ago
    > AGPL was a roundabout way of hinting that cloud providers should kick back some revenue and now that it didn't work the truth can come out. How does AGPL force kicking back of revenue? The only way I can think of is if the cloud-provider choose to relicense the software (for a fee), because they can always fulfill the terms of the AGPL by publishing all their changes without paying a dime.
    - wmf 8y ago
      There was an unstated assumption that hosting providers aren't willing to contribute back their secret sauce changes so they would have to buy a commercial license. But that didn't work. I don't know if the new MongoDB license will work either; the Commons "Clause" seems more honest in its wording.
- 8y ago
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
kodablah 8y ago
> comfy taking OSS work, doing a ton of proprietary development on it, and leaving the companies who did all the groundwork flailing in the wind Well, that's one way to put it I guess. I personally am OK with anyone taking my work and doing a ton of proprietary development on it. I wouldn't put it out there that way if I wasn't (and don't w/ my proprietary stuff). We need to stop demonizing restrictionless development. Same with commercial/copy-left development of course, but I'm seeing too much copy-left righteousness these days. To each their own. Also, we need to stop being so prideful in our work that we consider some uses of it an affront. Sometimes when you make things available to the world at large sans restrictions you have misusers. That's ok. But hating the proverbial man tends to only negatively affect downstream users at large. MongoDB can do what it wants, and should commercialize where it wants, but all this corporate hatred coupled with openness righteousness should stop being used as justification. > _Also_ I bet some random licensing folks are crapping their pants at IBM right now. I'm ashamed at how funny that is. So are their customers and all users who lost some freedoms today because of perceived self-righteousness. Ashamed is a fair word for grinning after pivots like these, but I definitely don't see a problem with the pivot itself. Again, to each their own.
- aseipp 8y ago
  > Same with commercial/copy-left development of course, but I'm seeing too much copy-left righteousness these days. I'm not sure what planet you live on, but the GPL and other various copy-left licenses have been on the slow decline for years in part due to things like SaaS negating the use of everything but the Affero GPL and the social 'implications' of using the GPL ("poisonous", "viral"), while the use of extremely liberally-licensed, "corporate-friendly" permissive licenses has skyrocketed. You don't have to look far (I've seen it more than once) to find people submitting issues on places like GitHub to completely relicense a project, just because it was GPL. Even here, every time a piece of code with a GPL license is attached and posted, you can be certain of someone pointing this out. There are technical factors involved (like what's the deal with JavaScript licensing), but ultimately less projects choose the GPL -- or any other "demanding" copy-left license -- than ever before, so I have no idea what you're talking about, other than a perceived persecution complex where you think people are trying to "stop you" from using their code? Of course, the funny thing is you say we need to stop "demonizing" restrictionless development, and of all copyleft licenses, the Affero GPL actually has risen in usage. But that's not because there's a big mean group of copy-leftists making people do it through blackmail. It's because it's risen in usage in corporate-sponsored, open-core projects, precisely to disincentivize systems like large, already-rich SaaS companies sucking the money out of their core customers by requiring them to share the source code for their changes (which they are often unable to do, making it effective). Corporations that sell open source software exactly understand how this game works -- they don't want other companies directly eating away the bulk of their revenue streams by just slapping a stupid UX and some user management patches on top, and so they license their software in an appropriate manner to try to cover all bases (source available, but without already-geared-up companies eating away their direct lifelines). You'll also notice most of the companies doing this strategy aren't already highly-powerful, highly-monied SaaS companies. They're often much smaller and starting off, trying to get their software in the hands of users, while retaining revenue leads. Highly powerful companies like Google can afford to just release everything under non-copyleft licenses like Apache or MIT. They can subsidize the development of the software through established business. But I imagine most people on this website wouldn't see these companies as being "copy-left righteous", only "protecting their investment". Unsurprisingly, this kind of understanding doesn't seem to extend to individual developers who license their code under a copyleft licenses (who are "righteous", and have no reason to care about anything other than the most people possible using their software). Maybe the "copy-left" righteousness you're seeing isn't a massive proliferation of copy-left licensing, but actually a result of people getting wise to the way this conversation plays out. After all, if I'm going to be accused of being righteous, I might as well use the GPL, since apparently anything less than a free-for-all isn't acceptable to a lot of people.
zjaffee 8y ago
It's funny because redis recently did something rather similar to what mongo just did. This will be an accelerating trend in open source, where these sorts of companies will either develop proprietary platforms with closed source code (databricks), or will move forward the way redis and mongo are.
- darkarmani 8y ago
  > This will be an accelerating trend in open source Until communities refuse to sign CLA that let projects bait-and-switch to another license once they have a large community and want to now take buckets of VC money.
  - 2little_time 8y ago
    In my experience its the opposite. Companies form around the business plan of exploiting FOSS by hosting, solicit buckets of VC money, and give nothing back. It's completely unsustainable. It's totally rational to create a license model that prevents hosting to third parties, but still allows end users to adopt the technology without paying. As has been pointed out elsewhere, that may not be right for all OS projects, but it should be an option.
lacker 8y ago
_Also_ I bet some random licensing folks are crapping their pants at IBM right now. Aren't you glad it isn't you! ;-)
manigandham 8y ago
There's no issue here. The whole point of OSS is that anyone can use it. Cloud vendors are providing managed services because that's what their customers demand, and the value isn't in the software itself but the managed part of it all. Any other company (like Compose) can do the same thing and there are several hundred vendors offering various options. MongoDB Atlas is entirely this, and seems to be doing well by leveraging their own expertise and moving faster than the others. If MongoDB now wants to change the license then they're free to do so, but they'll face the consequences of becoming more proprietary with their offering. It may help or it may hurt, but there's not some big universal argument to be made. If you don't want to make and give away free stuff, then don't. The rest of the world will still manage just fine.
- tannhaeuser 8y ago
  You've got it backwards. The fact that we now have cloud providers is a direct consequence of F/OSS and the software commoditization it brings. Cloud (running other people's software) and support are the only ways to make money in this market, so I'm expecting lots of fighting, cloud-specific forking, and license changes going forward. Cloud providers don't manage shit; they're just employing bottom-of-the-barrel staff to kindof keep things running, and put just enough development effort into their cloud offering to lock you in to their walled garden.
  - manigandham 8y ago
    What's backwards? Who cares how we got cloud providers? They are responding to customer demand and we've had colos and datacenter players for decades doing similar things, just at a smaller scale. Obviously the service is managed and that has value, regardless of the backend and your opinions on how they run it. Perhaps your issue is with all the customers who want and pay for this rather than providers meeting a need.
    - tannhaeuser 8y ago
      Yeah sorry reading my post just now I should've edited it, or not submitted in the first place. What I meant is that F/OSS has kindof created a situation where no commercial software development by ISVs is sustainable, and now F/OSS itself looses one of the last remaing avenues for monetarization eg. feedback into development and innovation.
talltimtom 8y ago
> exploit permissive licenses to the max. Why does this debate consyantly flare up again and again? No one is exploiting licenses, if you release something as open source then it’s open source, amongst other things you give up any claim to the money others might make using your software. That is your choice, any no one is exploiting you or your work by using the software within the license you granted them. People need to stop this attempt at having “financially closed” open source. If you want you software to be propriataty and have limitations on usage just do that. Don’t release it as open source and cry fowl when other treat it like that instead of treating it like you had a proprietary license on it.
- shady-lady 8y ago
  Spirit of the law vs. letter of the law

by mrkurt 8y ago

oropolo 8y ago

> It's clear Google and Amazon (and maybe even Azure) are comfy taking OSS work, doing a ton of proprietary development on it, and leaving the companies who did all the groundwork flailing in the wind. Have you seen the degree of investment Microsoft has made lately in Open Source? It's an upside-down world where Microsoft if a bigger champion -- and funder -- of open source than a company like Google which was built on Open Source software.

DannyBee 8y ago
Here, i'll make a provocative statement: Google has released roughly every meaningful patch it has made to the open source software it was built on[1]. As for funding, that's definitely not true by the numbers last i looked (and definitely was not true in the past). Without concrete disagreements, this is just handwaving. So if you make some, i'm happy to argue with real data. [1] The only cases i can think of that this isn't true is when the Googler who worked on it left before they got a chance to do that (and nobody has picked it up since)
- lacker 8y ago
  Google has released roughly every meaningful patch it has made to the open source software it was built on. Chrome or Android seem like good counterexamples, where the software that most people use (Chrome, or Android + Google Experience) is specifically kept in two separate buckets, open source and closed source, so that Google can strategically keep some parts open and some parts closed.
  - DannyBee 8y ago
    Err? They are certainly not useful counterexamples. That is open source software Google made itself. The original complaint was about taking other people's open source (mongodb) without contributing back. Not "failing to release stuff it made itself". That's a completely different thing. Even there, what i said is still true: Google has released every meaningful patch to the open source software it used in making Chrome/Android.
- darkarmani 8y ago
  At least 10 years ago, i thought google had a lot of custom linux kernel patches that weren't public.
  - DannyBee 8y ago
    For production server kernel: The only kernel patches these days i'm aware of that aren't upstream are hardware drivers for very custom hardware, or ones we released but upstream didn't want and we still maintain. Like any sane kernel team, google tries to minimize it's difference with upstream since it has huge maintenance cost.
mrkurt 8y ago
Yeah! It's weird, MS seems pretty well behaved. But they also offer stuff like this, I doubt Salvatore is seeing much benefit: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/cache/ https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/cache/
gigatexal 8y ago
But the companies that shepherd and develop the open source software and let the community use it for free has to be supported somehow. So unless the cloud companies want to fund these companies and thereby fund the developers of the open source software directly then these kinds of licenses make sense.
super3 8y ago
The total cloud market is around $180B. 90% are on running Linux, and 2/3 are running on OSS. If it is not in the billions its not enough.
- golubbe 8y ago
  To put that $180B in perspective, the TOTAL revenue of the public OSS companies (or those that were public recently before being acquired) is roughly $5B. That includes Red Hat, Mongo, Cloudera, Hortonworks, Elastic, and Mulesoft. If 2/3 of a $180B market is driven by open source, and we want the cycle of innovation to continue, it's in everyone's best interest to find ways to connect open source cloud usage to direct open source monetization.
Twirrim 8y ago
Amazon also spends a lot of time and effort on Open Source software, including the Linux kernel. They also contribute money to various open source foundations and target funding for various groups like OpenSSL. Microsoft gets all the news because it's a drastic change from normal behaviour. Amazon, Google, Oracle et all just keep steadily contributing stuff. A lot of the work is also deadly boring and not headline capturing stuff. Few simple queries to show the work they're doing just on the kernel: Amazon: https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/log/?id=07d981ad4cf1e78361c6db1c28ee5ba105f96cc1&qt=author&q=amazon.co https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/lin... Google: https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/log/?id=07d981ad4cf1e78361c6db1c28ee5ba105f96cc1&qt=author&q=google.co https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/lin... Microsoft: https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/log/?id=07d981ad4cf1e78361c6db1c28ee5ba105f96cc1&qt=author&q=microsoft.co https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/lin... Oracle: https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/log/?id=07d981ad4cf1e78361c6db1c28ee5ba105f96cc1&qt=author&q=oracle.com https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/lin...
yarrel 8y ago
The foxes purchasing the henhouse isn't them championing chickens...

babuskov 8y ago

> exploit permissive licenses to the max I feel like many people deciding to use an open source license for their project never consider the consequences of such choice. They use OSS because it's "cool" or they hope to get some free work done for them. If you pick an open source license and someone uses your code to build something else within the license boundaries, that is not a Bad Thing(tm). I have released many open source projects under MIT and GPL licenses and I have no problem with anyone repackaging it however they please, as long as they respect the license terms. On the other hand, when I pick an OSS software to build upon, I pick it exactly because of the license and plan to use the license to the extent it is allowed. If the license doesn't look like a good fit, I use something else or write my own code. I don't feel like Google/Amazon/etc. owe anything to anyone just because they made it and now have a lot of money.

gshulegaard 8y ago
I generally agree with you. I just wanted to point out that from an Economic perspective this: > I don't feel like Google/Amazon/etc. owe anything to anyone just because they made it and now have a lot of money. And the ability to utilize that war chest to cannibalize the best of open source to create private differentiators raises the barrier of entry for competition. This market would naturally drift towards an oligopoly-like market equilibrium. Like I said, I agree with your perspective on licenses. I would just also like OSS to be the great equalizer that instills innovation and disruption in the greater tech market place. But so long as tech giants can take any good new OSS, pay top dollar to recruit great engineers, and then throw them at OSS then I don't think this ideal vision will come to fruition.
- nickpsecurity 8y ago
  Ill add patent trolling and copyright issues like API ruling to what you said. The companies with money can pay bribes to weaken or block FOSS activity in varios ways. Better if OSS/FOSS companies have business models with money to fight that.
setgree 8y ago
> I feel like many people deciding to use an open source license for their project never consider the consequences of such choice I might say instead that the norms of open source software development -- attribution, collaboration, good faith -- are so baked in to small, high-trust communities that they might seem as though they'll be obvious to everyone. And then your software makes it way to the public and you realize that those were just assumptions and not written into the letter of agreement at any point. I'm speaking as an outside observer on this.

DannyBee 8y ago

"I'm sure people will get riled up about this, but it makes sense. Building a business on an OSS database in a world of behemoth cloud providers is really hard. It's clear Google and Amazon (and maybe even Azure) are comfy taking OSS work, doing a ton of proprietary development on it, and leaving the companies who did all the groundwork flailing in the wind. " This is simply not true in any meaningful way. Please cite real data. It's very hard to disagree with handwaving like this. Both Google's official policy (which is super clear about this: https://opensource.google.com/docs/ https://opensource.google.com/docs/), and practice (releasing and working on tens of thousands of open source projects) say otherwise. I would love to see the data that goes with this claim.

wmf 8y ago
It seems like even if the cloud providers contributed 100% of their code back to Mongo it still wouldn't be enough to keep Mongo alive. They need money, not code. That's the subtext to this whole discussion. AGPL was a roundabout way of hinting that cloud providers should kick back some revenue and now that it didn't work the truth can come out.
- sangnoir 8y ago
  > AGPL was a roundabout way of hinting that cloud providers should kick back some revenue and now that it didn't work the truth can come out. How does AGPL force kicking back of revenue? The only way I can think of is if the cloud-provider choose to relicense the software (for a fee), because they can always fulfill the terms of the AGPL by publishing all their changes without paying a dime.
  - wmf 8y ago
    There was an unstated assumption that hosting providers aren't willing to contribute back their secret sauce changes so they would have to buy a commercial license. But that didn't work. I don't know if the new MongoDB license will work either; the Commons "Clause" seems more honest in its wording.
8y ago

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

kodablah 8y ago

> comfy taking OSS work, doing a ton of proprietary development on it, and leaving the companies who did all the groundwork flailing in the wind Well, that's one way to put it I guess. I personally am OK with anyone taking my work and doing a ton of proprietary development on it. I wouldn't put it out there that way if I wasn't (and don't w/ my proprietary stuff). We need to stop demonizing restrictionless development. Same with commercial/copy-left development of course, but I'm seeing too much copy-left righteousness these days. To each their own. Also, we need to stop being so prideful in our work that we consider some uses of it an affront. Sometimes when you make things available to the world at large sans restrictions you have misusers. That's ok. But hating the proverbial man tends to only negatively affect downstream users at large. MongoDB can do what it wants, and should commercialize where it wants, but all this corporate hatred coupled with openness righteousness should stop being used as justification. > _Also_ I bet some random licensing folks are crapping their pants at IBM right now. I'm ashamed at how funny that is. So are their customers and all users who lost some freedoms today because of perceived self-righteousness. Ashamed is a fair word for grinning after pivots like these, but I definitely don't see a problem with the pivot itself. Again, to each their own.

aseipp 8y ago
> Same with commercial/copy-left development of course, but I'm seeing too much copy-left righteousness these days. I'm not sure what planet you live on, but the GPL and other various copy-left licenses have been on the slow decline for years in part due to things like SaaS negating the use of everything but the Affero GPL and the social 'implications' of using the GPL ("poisonous", "viral"), while the use of extremely liberally-licensed, "corporate-friendly" permissive licenses has skyrocketed. You don't have to look far (I've seen it more than once) to find people submitting issues on places like GitHub to completely relicense a project, just because it was GPL. Even here, every time a piece of code with a GPL license is attached and posted, you can be certain of someone pointing this out. There are technical factors involved (like what's the deal with JavaScript licensing), but ultimately less projects choose the GPL -- or any other "demanding" copy-left license -- than ever before, so I have no idea what you're talking about, other than a perceived persecution complex where you think people are trying to "stop you" from using their code? Of course, the funny thing is you say we need to stop "demonizing" restrictionless development, and of all copyleft licenses, the Affero GPL actually has risen in usage. But that's not because there's a big mean group of copy-leftists making people do it through blackmail. It's because it's risen in usage in corporate-sponsored, open-core projects, precisely to disincentivize systems like large, already-rich SaaS companies sucking the money out of their core customers by requiring them to share the source code for their changes (which they are often unable to do, making it effective). Corporations that sell open source software exactly understand how this game works -- they don't want other companies directly eating away the bulk of their revenue streams by just slapping a stupid UX and some user management patches on top, and so they license their software in an appropriate manner to try to cover all bases (source available, but without already-geared-up companies eating away their direct lifelines). You'll also notice most of the companies doing this strategy aren't already highly-powerful, highly-monied SaaS companies. They're often much smaller and starting off, trying to get their software in the hands of users, while retaining revenue leads. Highly powerful companies like Google can afford to just release everything under non-copyleft licenses like Apache or MIT. They can subsidize the development of the software through established business. But I imagine most people on this website wouldn't see these companies as being "copy-left righteous", only "protecting their investment". Unsurprisingly, this kind of understanding doesn't seem to extend to individual developers who license their code under a copyleft licenses (who are "righteous", and have no reason to care about anything other than the most people possible using their software). Maybe the "copy-left" righteousness you're seeing isn't a massive proliferation of copy-left licensing, but actually a result of people getting wise to the way this conversation plays out. After all, if I'm going to be accused of being righteous, I might as well use the GPL, since apparently anything less than a free-for-all isn't acceptable to a lot of people.

zjaffee 8y ago

It's funny because redis recently did something rather similar to what mongo just did. This will be an accelerating trend in open source, where these sorts of companies will either develop proprietary platforms with closed source code (databricks), or will move forward the way redis and mongo are.

darkarmani 8y ago
> This will be an accelerating trend in open source Until communities refuse to sign CLA that let projects bait-and-switch to another license once they have a large community and want to now take buckets of VC money.
- 2little_time 8y ago
  In my experience its the opposite. Companies form around the business plan of exploiting FOSS by hosting, solicit buckets of VC money, and give nothing back. It's completely unsustainable. It's totally rational to create a license model that prevents hosting to third parties, but still allows end users to adopt the technology without paying. As has been pointed out elsewhere, that may not be right for all OS projects, but it should be an option.

lacker 8y ago

_Also_ I bet some random licensing folks are crapping their pants at IBM right now. Aren't you glad it isn't you! ;-)

manigandham 8y ago

There's no issue here. The whole point of OSS is that anyone can use it. Cloud vendors are providing managed services because that's what their customers demand, and the value isn't in the software itself but the managed part of it all. Any other company (like Compose) can do the same thing and there are several hundred vendors offering various options. MongoDB Atlas is entirely this, and seems to be doing well by leveraging their own expertise and moving faster than the others. If MongoDB now wants to change the license then they're free to do so, but they'll face the consequences of becoming more proprietary with their offering. It may help or it may hurt, but there's not some big universal argument to be made. If you don't want to make and give away free stuff, then don't. The rest of the world will still manage just fine.

tannhaeuser 8y ago
You've got it backwards. The fact that we now have cloud providers is a direct consequence of F/OSS and the software commoditization it brings. Cloud (running other people's software) and support are the only ways to make money in this market, so I'm expecting lots of fighting, cloud-specific forking, and license changes going forward. Cloud providers don't manage shit; they're just employing bottom-of-the-barrel staff to kindof keep things running, and put just enough development effort into their cloud offering to lock you in to their walled garden.
- manigandham 8y ago
  What's backwards? Who cares how we got cloud providers? They are responding to customer demand and we've had colos and datacenter players for decades doing similar things, just at a smaller scale. Obviously the service is managed and that has value, regardless of the backend and your opinions on how they run it. Perhaps your issue is with all the customers who want and pay for this rather than providers meeting a need.
  - tannhaeuser 8y ago
    Yeah sorry reading my post just now I should've edited it, or not submitted in the first place. What I meant is that F/OSS has kindof created a situation where no commercial software development by ISVs is sustainable, and now F/OSS itself looses one of the last remaing avenues for monetarization eg. feedback into development and innovation.

talltimtom 8y ago

> exploit permissive licenses to the max. Why does this debate consyantly flare up again and again? No one is exploiting licenses, if you release something as open source then it’s open source, amongst other things you give up any claim to the money others might make using your software. That is your choice, any no one is exploiting you or your work by using the software within the license you granted them. People need to stop this attempt at having “financially closed” open source. If you want you software to be propriataty and have limitations on usage just do that. Don’t release it as open source and cry fowl when other treat it like that instead of treating it like you had a proprietary license on it.

shady-lady 8y ago
Spirit of the law vs. letter of the law