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This appears to be the licence for the documentation on the wire protocol, not the actual wire protocol itself. That would be essentially a part of MongoDB itse

This appears to be the licence for the documentation on the wire protocol, not the actual wire protocol itself. That would be essentially a part of MongoDB itself, or likely as the Google vs Oracle case decided, not something that can be licenced. At least that's my understanding. Am I missing something here? It's fairly reasonable for a company to licence their docs with a non-commercial licence like this.

yuubi 5y ago
The "You may not use or adapt this material for any commercial purpose, such as to create a commercial database or database-as-a-service offering" language suggests that they think the license covers more than just distributing the document, which I believe is an unusual interpretation of what a spec copyright allows the author to prevent. Lawyer repellent (I hope): The quote comes from https://github.com/mongodb/docs/commit/50e48200cde7e2eaffdc6b726a9cdf2659f0e073 https://github.com/mongodb/docs/commit/50e48200cde7e2eaffdc6... , and anyone who receives this comment may copy it as they like.
- chippiewill 5y ago
  I think they just stuffed up the wording. I think the whole "can't use it to create a commercial database" means you can't use the document itself (i.e. "this material") as part of your own commercial database offering but you can absolutely adapt the protocol and share the document that Mongo created under the same terms (i.e. share-alike). Because it's already in source form and isn't "compiled in" into a derived form I don't think it has the same potency from an infectious license perspective as GPL does. If you bundle this document as part of your commercial database I think they can't do diddly squat as long as you make clear that the document itself is still under the CC sharealike license.
  - yuubi 5y ago
    I (not a lawyer) understand copyright law to mostly prohibit us from copying the spec document without permission, and then the license provides permission for some copying of the document. I'm pretty sure the authors really want to prevent competing implementations that make money for someone else, and the wording expresses their intent. I believe that copyright on the document won't let them stop a company that can afford decent lawyers from implementing the spec, but it certainly doesn't make me any more likely to touch anything related.
tedivm 5y ago
It's pretty explicitly written that they mean for this to apply to the specification, not just the documentation. > You may not use or adapt this material for any commercial purpose, such as to create a commercial database or database-as-a-service offering. It'll be exciting to see Oracle vs Google turn into Mongo vs AWS, which is clearly where this is eventually going.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- jchw 5y ago
  The specification itself is documentation. edit: I mean, it’s not that I strongly care, but why not explain if you disagree? How exactly is a specification not a form of documentation? The relevant definition for spec would probably be: > a detailed description of the design and materials used to make something. That sounds an awful lot like documentation. Maybe you are implying that you can’t read it and then make your own implementation of that reading, but that’s not true. IANAL, but I’d be willing to bet my lawful ass it means you can’t reproduce the document for your own commercial implementation. Not that you can’t reference it. I don’t think “derivative” is that strong.
  - derefr 5y ago
    Presuming the wire-protocol specification contains things like schemas for Protobuf/Avro/etc. data formats (the kind of formats where most compiled-language libraries for them do compile-time code-generation against the schema to create efficient codec modules), it would be very hard to make a conforming implementation that doesn't breach copyright by embedding those schemas byte-for-byte.
    - adambatkin 5y ago
      If you reverse-engineered the protocol (either from scratch, or by looking at existing implementations) and happened to (independently) come up with an identical looking data schema, that would _not_ be protected by copyright.

yuubi 5y ago

The "You may not use or adapt this material for any commercial purpose, such as to create a commercial database or database-as-a-service offering" language suggests that they think the license covers more than just distributing the document, which I believe is an unusual interpretation of what a spec copyright allows the author to prevent. Lawyer repellent (I hope): The quote comes from https://github.com/mongodb/docs/commit/50e48200cde7e2eaffdc6b726a9cdf2659f0e073 https://github.com/mongodb/docs/commit/50e48200cde7e2eaffdc6... , and anyone who receives this comment may copy it as they like.

chippiewill 5y ago
I think they just stuffed up the wording. I think the whole "can't use it to create a commercial database" means you can't use the document itself (i.e. "this material") as part of your own commercial database offering but you can absolutely adapt the protocol and share the document that Mongo created under the same terms (i.e. share-alike). Because it's already in source form and isn't "compiled in" into a derived form I don't think it has the same potency from an infectious license perspective as GPL does. If you bundle this document as part of your commercial database I think they can't do diddly squat as long as you make clear that the document itself is still under the CC sharealike license.
- yuubi 5y ago
  I (not a lawyer) understand copyright law to mostly prohibit us from copying the spec document without permission, and then the license provides permission for some copying of the document. I'm pretty sure the authors really want to prevent competing implementations that make money for someone else, and the wording expresses their intent. I believe that copyright on the document won't let them stop a company that can afford decent lawyers from implementing the spec, but it certainly doesn't make me any more likely to touch anything related.

tedivm 5y ago

It's pretty explicitly written that they mean for this to apply to the specification, not just the documentation. > You may not use or adapt this material for any commercial purpose, such as to create a commercial database or database-as-a-service offering. It'll be exciting to see Oracle vs Google turn into Mongo vs AWS, which is clearly where this is eventually going.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
jchw 5y ago
The specification itself is documentation. edit: I mean, it’s not that I strongly care, but why not explain if you disagree? How exactly is a specification not a form of documentation? The relevant definition for spec would probably be: > a detailed description of the design and materials used to make something. That sounds an awful lot like documentation. Maybe you are implying that you can’t read it and then make your own implementation of that reading, but that’s not true. IANAL, but I’d be willing to bet my lawful ass it means you can’t reproduce the document for your own commercial implementation. Not that you can’t reference it. I don’t think “derivative” is that strong.
- derefr 5y ago
  Presuming the wire-protocol specification contains things like schemas for Protobuf/Avro/etc. data formats (the kind of formats where most compiled-language libraries for them do compile-time code-generation against the schema to create efficient codec modules), it would be very hard to make a conforming implementation that doesn't breach copyright by embedding those schemas byte-for-byte.
  - adambatkin 5y ago
    If you reverse-engineered the protocol (either from scratch, or by looking at existing implementations) and happened to (independently) come up with an identical looking data schema, that would _not_ be protected by copyright.