Affero not harmful [LWN.net]

Affero not harmful

Posted Feb 13, 2017 7:56 UTC (Mon) by ncm (guest, #165)
In reply to: Affero not harmful by Cyberax
Parent article: RethinkDB source relicensed, donated to the Linux Foundation

Getting code into Mongo's github would take a copyright assignment, as with FSF. (And you would need to persuade them to pull it, likely not an easy task.) But, just as with FSF, you are free to fork the source and distribute it with your own code. People do, e.g. RockDB. So, Free. If they change the license, you still have your code and your fork.

Enterprise customers do get a different license that gives them access to extra stuff they want. But none of that is necessary to use or to change and redistribute the code. As you note, Mongo specifically disclaim ownership of your "views" etc. So, what is not Free? That you can't take it proprietary, as you can with PosgreSQL? How are they different, in that way, from Red Hat?

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Affero not harmful

Posted Feb 13, 2017 8:28 UTC (Mon) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link] (1 responses)

No, it's not. Any code that is dual-licensed under a proprietary license is not free. It's merely shareware.

And I can't even find what RockDB is...

Fun fact, Mongo's license disclaimer actually can NOT be legally applied by their downstream forks.

Affero not harmful

Posted Feb 14, 2017 10:57 UTC (Tue) by micka (subscriber, #38720) [Link]

If it's RocksDB, then I think it's a fork of LevelDB.
(I just recently had a dive into these kind of databases)
Those are key-values DB AFAIK (while mongodb is a document database).