Making the GPL more scary

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.