Making the GPL more scary [LWN.net]

Making the GPL more scary

Posted Oct 19, 2018 8:30 UTC (Fri) by edeloget (subscriber, #88392)
Parent article: Making the GPL more scary

> Like Redis Labs before it, MongoDB has concluded that this license allows a bit too much. In particular, cloud providers are offering access to MongoDB instances without cutting the company in on the resulting revenue stream, and that doesn't feel right.

Oh, wait.

I was under the impression that allowing another user to use your software freely was the end goal of all open source licences.

Am I wrong?

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Making the GPL more scary

Posted Oct 19, 2018 17:00 UTC (Fri) by rriggs (guest, #11598) [Link]

> I was under the impression that allowing another user to use your software freely was the end goal of all open source licences.

> Am I wrong?

I believe so. There are multiple goals for open source projects, which is why there are so many OSS license varieties. If that were the only goal, we would need only one license. However, licenses may also attempt to limit the author's liability, limit one's ability to redistribute modifications to the software, limit how one can use potentially trademarked names of software, etc. In the case of both the AGPL and now this one, the license attempts to impose requirements on the user of the software when they provide access to the functionality of modified versions of the software. One can say the same of GPL/LGPL in some respect.

I personally think the AGPL has overstepped a boundary a bit. But, at the same time, I can understand why it might be economically useful and a societal good. I do not yet see where Mongo's license provides a societal benefit.

Making the GPL more scary

Posted Oct 25, 2018 1:25 UTC (Thu) by brooksmoses (guest, #88422) [Link]

Hah!

I'm pretty sure "that doesn't feel right" was a tongue-in-cheek comment with an implied "to the MongoDB corporate decision-makers" after it. But then I'm also pretty sure your comment was responding in kind, so. :)

Pedantically, I might quibble that I think in most cases that's more a means to the end, rather than the end goal itself. For instance, in creating and applying the GPL, the GNU Project and the FSF also have the end goal of making it compelling for _other_ software developers to allow users to use their software freely too, so that all software becomes freely fixable by its users.

Even the BSD-like licenses, in many cases, are applied by people who have an the end goal of producing a regime where otherwise-competitor companies can collaborate on a project without excessive legal wrangling. The mechanism of doing that is to allow any user to use and modify the software freely, but the collaborative development community this fosters is the practical end goal. Or, when companies apply free-software licenses to libraries they throw "over the wall" to the world, this is often with an end goal of encouraging people to use their not-free-as-in-beer hardware or as-a-service products, and allowing people to freely write software that makes it easy to interact with those things is a means towards that end goal.

And it seems here that MongoDB is finding that this is not actually a means to the end they want. In some ways, that's not too surprising -- releasing your core product as freely-as-in-beer usable is a pretty challenging way to run a for-profit company, and very few companies that contribute to open source projects do that.