Honest question, does MongoDB work?

Until recently, no. But apparently they got serious about making it work and now it actually does. See https://jepsen.io/analyses/mongodb-3-4-0-rc3 for verification.

I realized this 2 months ago at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16386129

That's Nostradamus-level crazytown. What next, PHP strongly enforcing a sound static type system with immutable defaults, GADTs and dependent types?

Congrats to the MongoDB team!

> What next, PHP strongly enforcing a sound static type system with immutable defaults, GADTs and dependent types?

Too funny!

MongoDB is pretty average at absolutely everything.

It's fast to install on a dev machine though, lol.

For better or worse, many times UX is more important than functionality.

MongoDB is AGPL or proprietary. Many companies have a policy against using AGPL licensed code. So, if you work at one of those companies, then open source MongoDB is not an option (at least for work projects), and proprietary may not be either (depending on budget etc).

FoundationDB is now licensed under Apache 2, which is a much more permissive license, so most companies' open source policies allow it.

Unless people want to change the mongodb code that they would be using, using the agpl software should be a non issue and there are not problems with it. People should start understanding the available licenses instead of spreading fear.

It isn't "spreading fear", it is just reality. Google bans AGPL-licensed software internally: https://opensource.google.com/docs/using/agpl-policy/

I know that multiple other companies have a similar policy (either a complete ban on using AGPL-licensed software, or special approval required to use it), although unlike Google, they don't post their internal policy publicly.

If someone works at one of these companies, what do you want to do – spend your day trying to argue to get the AGPL ban changed, or a special exception for your project; or do you just go with the non-AGPL alternative and get on with coding?

The main reason it's a problem at many of the companies which ban it is they have a lot of engineers who readily patch and combine code from disparate sources and might not always apply the right discipline to keep AGPL things appropriately separate. Bright-line rules can be quite useful.

It is true that MongoDB's AGPL contagion and compliance burden, if you don't modify it, is less than many fear. It is also true that those corporate concerns are valid. MongoDB does sell commercial licenses so that such companies can handle their unavoidable MongoDB needs, but they would tend to minimize that usage.

Because MongoDB doesn't (didn't at least) anything at all good except for little complex document modifiers.

It was a very bad rdbms (since they marketed as a replacement) and a very bad sharded db (marketed too).