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They're allowed to license Mongo on whatever terms they see fit, but we're also allowed to judge them on the licence terms they choose. If they had a source-pr
by pdpi 8y ago
They're allowed to license Mongo on whatever terms they see fit, but we're also allowed to judge them on the licence terms they choose.
If they had a source-provided, not-for-commercial-use hobbyist/educational licence and a proprietary licence, nobody would bat an eyelid. What they seem to be doing instead (this might or might not be correct, but is definitely the point the article is making) is burdening their "open source" licence with enough gotchas that it becomes quite unclear as to whether it's allowable in a commercial production environment (while still getting to claim it's Open Source Software), thus pushing people towards the proprietary licence without outright demanding it — which might be 100% legal, but is also profoundly dishonest.
- sytse 8y agoI think that it is interesting that this is enabled by a CLA. If the project would have used a Developer Certificate of Origin (DCO) this relicensing would not have been possible. When Debian started to use GitLab they asked us to replace our CLA for the open source code to a DCO. They saw the risk of relicensing and addressed it.
- zzzcpan 8y agoRelicensing is still very much possible with DCO. You just put contributions under the license they were originally submitted and use whatever license you want for owned code. Essentially providing a separate license(s) for contributions.