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The SSPL "debate" was indeed a shit-show hijacked by people either abusing permissive-license ideologies with a corporate interest in mind, or so blinded by tha

The SSPL "debate" was indeed a shit-show hijacked by people either abusing permissive-license ideologies with a corporate interest in mind, or so blinded by that ideology that they are unable to grasp the idea that freedom is an inherently contradictory concept, and that to maximise overall freedom across space and time it is necessary to restrict freedoms that result in a restriction of more freedoms. Good on these guys, I hope they build a licensing model or some other thing that can stand up to Amazon. I still consider SSPL to be "free software" very much within the ideals that movement, regardless of what the OSI says.

catern 7y ago
>I still consider SSPL to be "free software" very much within the ideals that movement, regardless of what the OSI says. Yeah, I think the issue is that these days there's a lot of open source developers, who zealously believe in open source, but are working for corporations. They have a natural incentive to maximize the usefulness of open source for corporations, whether they explicitly acknowledge that or not. On a social level, I think that's having many effects, one of which is the backlash against SSPL, which is obviously hard for mostly-proprietary corporations to comply with. Many open source programmers have built a mental model around the notion that the scripts that operate and deploy an application (service) aren't part of the application (service), and therefore don't need to be open source. But that doesn't make any sense from a software-freedom perspective! The fundamental tenets of open source are that users should be able to use, modify, and redistribute the application. If the users don't have access to the scripts that are required to actually deploy a modified version of the service, then it's not meaningfully open source. That's a new perspective, it's true, but I think the old perspective (the scripts to deploy a service don't need to be open sourced) was just wrong, it came from a long period of biased, commercial-centric thinking.
phkahler 7y ago
Why did they create SSPL when AGPL already existed? IMHO all use cases can probably be covered by MIT/BSD, GPL, LGPL, and AGPL. Everything else is license proliferation and adds confusion and problems sharing code between projects.
- infinity0 7y ago
  https://www.mongodb.com/licensing/server-side-public-license/faq#how-data-is-stored https://www.mongodb.com/licensing/server-side-public-license... "Why did you base the SSPL on GPL v3 instead of AGPL?"
- tsimionescu 7y ago
  MongoDB was already AGPL, but that didn't suffice. Amazon simply took the free version of MongoDB, as is, deployed it on its systems in a scalable way, and sold that to customers. They gave the code for MongoDB away, per the terms of the AGPL. Hence, the need for a new license. However, they seem to have kept the deployment infrastructure as a trade secret, and since that didn't interact directly with MongoDB's interfaces, it șes that it really didn't come under the scope of the AGPL.
  - klez 7y ago
    Companies did that for years with Linux, Apache, MySQL etc., and noone got riled up enough to produce this mess. I think another commenter got it right: this is a fuss created by commercial entities that wanted to have their cake and eat it too.
- msbarnett 7y ago
  > Why did they create SSPL when AGPL already existed? Because they were already using the AGPL, and it did precisely Nothing to stop Amazon from turning into a massive free-rider who undermined the very ability of the project to fund continued development of the project Amazon was free-riding on.
  - jimktrains2 7y ago
    But why should Amazon be prevented from running said software? "Because I don't like it" isn't a good reason.
    - galaxyLogic 7y ago
      I agree. If it is free/permissive license then the point of such a license is that anybody can use it freely. Why does MongoDB not want Amazon to run it freely? Because MongoDB wants to make money.
xeeeeeeeeeeenu 7y ago
>I still consider SSPL to be "free software" very much within the ideals that movement, regardless of what the OSI says. SSPL is less free than most of propertiary EULAs. It is literally impossible to comply with the section 13 of the license. SSPL requires the user to release the source code of everything they are using to host their service and license it under the terms of SSPL. Everything, that even includes operating system and firmware of the server used to host the user's service. No one is able to do that. I don't understand how can anyone defend that awful license.
- sbmccarth 7y ago
  Full Disclosure, I work for MongoDB. Please check out the SSPL FAQ (https://www.mongodb.com/licensing/server-side-public-license/faq https://www.mongodb.com/licensing/server-side-public-license...). Section 13 is focused only on entities that wish to offer MongoDB as a public third party service. They are free to do so under the condition the hosting company offering MongoDB as a service makes "service source code" open source. For nearly all MongoDB users, this has no impact.

catern 7y ago

>I still consider SSPL to be "free software" very much within the ideals that movement, regardless of what the OSI says. Yeah, I think the issue is that these days there's a lot of open source developers, who zealously believe in open source, but are working for corporations. They have a natural incentive to maximize the usefulness of open source for corporations, whether they explicitly acknowledge that or not. On a social level, I think that's having many effects, one of which is the backlash against SSPL, which is obviously hard for mostly-proprietary corporations to comply with. Many open source programmers have built a mental model around the notion that the scripts that operate and deploy an application (service) aren't part of the application (service), and therefore don't need to be open source. But that doesn't make any sense from a software-freedom perspective! The fundamental tenets of open source are that users should be able to use, modify, and redistribute the application. If the users don't have access to the scripts that are required to actually deploy a modified version of the service, then it's not meaningfully open source. That's a new perspective, it's true, but I think the old perspective (the scripts to deploy a service don't need to be open sourced) was just wrong, it came from a long period of biased, commercial-centric thinking.

phkahler 7y ago

Why did they create SSPL when AGPL already existed? IMHO all use cases can probably be covered by MIT/BSD, GPL, LGPL, and AGPL. Everything else is license proliferation and adds confusion and problems sharing code between projects.

infinity0 7y ago
https://www.mongodb.com/licensing/server-side-public-license/faq#how-data-is-stored https://www.mongodb.com/licensing/server-side-public-license... "Why did you base the SSPL on GPL v3 instead of AGPL?"
tsimionescu 7y ago
MongoDB was already AGPL, but that didn't suffice. Amazon simply took the free version of MongoDB, as is, deployed it on its systems in a scalable way, and sold that to customers. They gave the code for MongoDB away, per the terms of the AGPL. Hence, the need for a new license. However, they seem to have kept the deployment infrastructure as a trade secret, and since that didn't interact directly with MongoDB's interfaces, it șes that it really didn't come under the scope of the AGPL.
- klez 7y ago
  Companies did that for years with Linux, Apache, MySQL etc., and noone got riled up enough to produce this mess. I think another commenter got it right: this is a fuss created by commercial entities that wanted to have their cake and eat it too.
msbarnett 7y ago
> Why did they create SSPL when AGPL already existed? Because they were already using the AGPL, and it did precisely Nothing to stop Amazon from turning into a massive free-rider who undermined the very ability of the project to fund continued development of the project Amazon was free-riding on.
- jimktrains2 7y ago
  But why should Amazon be prevented from running said software? "Because I don't like it" isn't a good reason.
  - galaxyLogic 7y ago
    I agree. If it is free/permissive license then the point of such a license is that anybody can use it freely. Why does MongoDB not want Amazon to run it freely? Because MongoDB wants to make money.

xeeeeeeeeeeenu 7y ago

>I still consider SSPL to be "free software" very much within the ideals that movement, regardless of what the OSI says. SSPL is less free than most of propertiary EULAs. It is literally impossible to comply with the section 13 of the license. SSPL requires the user to release the source code of everything they are using to host their service and license it under the terms of SSPL. Everything, that even includes operating system and firmware of the server used to host the user's service. No one is able to do that. I don't understand how can anyone defend that awful license.

sbmccarth 7y ago
Full Disclosure, I work for MongoDB. Please check out the SSPL FAQ (https://www.mongodb.com/licensing/server-side-public-license/faq https://www.mongodb.com/licensing/server-side-public-license...). Section 13 is focused only on entities that wish to offer MongoDB as a public third party service. They are free to do so under the condition the hosting company offering MongoDB as a service makes "service source code" open source. For nearly all MongoDB users, this has no impact.