3 ms·

I had always assumed (without really verifying it) the reason for this was because for a large company that would be capable and interested in re-selling these

I had always assumed (without really verifying it) the reason for this was because for a large company that would be capable and interested in re-selling these services, they would NEED to make some changes to integrate it with their rest of their systems. And those changes would be very sensitive and specific to their own infrastructure and system. At least in my limited experience with extremely large companies (which are the companies that would be capable/interested in reselling these services) they rarely run open source software exactly as is, even for their internal usage. They usually patch it themselves or contract out patches either to fit within their systems, or for specific features the want/need.

hardwaresofton 6y ago
Ahh OK, then this is really more against large enterprises and less for lean/smaller aaS companies. Seems like there's some leverage here to be taken advantage of.
- chamakits 6y ago
  There is, but it's also not risk free. For example, MongoDB used to be AGPL and there where some companies dedicated to provide hosted services for it. Specifically MongoHQ (later renamed to Compose) and MongoLabs (later renamed to mLabs). I believe neither of these companies had any specific contract with MongoDB, nor where they breaching the AGPL in any way. However, MongoDB eventually changed it's license in a way that explicitly made it impossible for these services to continue to exist without making their entire stack open source, or getting a separate license agreement with them. In this particular example, the impact may have been minor for these two companies, as Compose got acquired by IBM before this, and mLabs got acquired by MongoDB themselves. But any other product that effectively ran hosted MongoDB for you would need to get a license from MongoDB. It is speculated (fairly) that these changes were made so that MongoDB could get a greater market share with their own hosted that they sell, and to block out much bigger cloud providers from finding ways to wrap their services in non license breaking ways, but still not providing much more extra value add other than hosted Mongo.

hardwaresofton 6y ago

Ahh OK, then this is really more against large enterprises and less for lean/smaller aaS companies. Seems like there's some leverage here to be taken advantage of.

chamakits 6y ago
There is, but it's also not risk free. For example, MongoDB used to be AGPL and there where some companies dedicated to provide hosted services for it. Specifically MongoHQ (later renamed to Compose) and MongoLabs (later renamed to mLabs). I believe neither of these companies had any specific contract with MongoDB, nor where they breaching the AGPL in any way. However, MongoDB eventually changed it's license in a way that explicitly made it impossible for these services to continue to exist without making their entire stack open source, or getting a separate license agreement with them. In this particular example, the impact may have been minor for these two companies, as Compose got acquired by IBM before this, and mLabs got acquired by MongoDB themselves. But any other product that effectively ran hosted MongoDB for you would need to get a license from MongoDB. It is speculated (fairly) that these changes were made so that MongoDB could get a greater market share with their own hosted that they sell, and to block out much bigger cloud providers from finding ways to wrap their services in non license breaking ways, but still not providing much more extra value add other than hosted Mongo.