I feel like many people deciding to use an open source license for their project never consider the consequences of such choice. They use OSS because it's "cool" or they hope to get some free work done for them. If you pick an open source license and someone uses your code to build something else within the license boundaries, that is not a Bad Thing(tm).

I have released many open source projects under MIT and GPL licenses and I have no problem with anyone repackaging it however they please, as long as they respect the license terms.

On the other hand, when I pick an OSS software to build upon, I pick it exactly because of the license and plan to use the license to the extent it is allowed. If the license doesn't look like a good fit, I use something else or write my own code.

I don't feel like Google/Amazon/etc. owe anything to anyone just because they made it and now have a lot of money.

I just wanted to point out that from an Economic perspective this:

> I don't feel like Google/Amazon/etc. owe anything to anyone just because they made it and now have a lot of money.

And the ability to utilize that war chest to cannibalize the best of open source to create private differentiators raises the barrier of entry for competition. This market would naturally drift towards an oligopoly-like market equilibrium.

Like I said, I agree with your perspective on licenses. I would just also like OSS to be the great equalizer that instills innovation and disruption in the greater tech market place. But so long as tech giants can take any good new OSS, pay top dollar to recruit great engineers, and then throw them at OSS then I don't think this ideal vision will come to fruition.

I might say instead that the norms of open source software development -- attribution, collaboration, good faith -- are so baked in to small, high-trust communities that they might seem as though they'll be obvious to everyone. And then your software makes it way to the public and you realize that those were just assumptions and not written into the letter of agreement at any point.

I'm speaking as an outside observer on this.

And I say this as someone who has released all of his software within the past decade using either GPLv3 or APGL, for exactly this reason.

When they fail to give back by dodging taxes, paying minimum wages, spying on people, cornering markets, competing against FLOSS project/orgs they are breaking good faith relations (and the spirit of law)

Open source db software is suitable for these dual licenses - using it is free, but if you are going to sell products and services that are repackaged versions of the tool, you should pay the creator (like mysql).

Well, that's one way to put it I guess. I personally am OK with anyone taking my work and doing a ton of proprietary development on it. I wouldn't put it out there that way if I wasn't (and don't w/ my proprietary stuff).

We need to stop demonizing restrictionless development. Same with commercial/copy-left development of course, but I'm seeing too much copy-left righteousness these days. To each their own. Also, we need to stop being so prideful in our work that we consider some uses of it an affront. Sometimes when you make things available to the world at large sans restrictions you have misusers. That's ok. But hating the proverbial man tends to only negatively affect downstream users at large. MongoDB can do what it wants, and should commercialize where it wants, but all this corporate hatred coupled with openness righteousness should stop being used as justification.

> _Also_ I bet some random licensing folks are crapping their pants at IBM right now. I'm ashamed at how funny that is.

So are their customers and all users who lost some freedoms today because of perceived self-righteousness. Ashamed is a fair word for grinning after pivots like these, but I definitely don't see a problem with the pivot itself. Again, to each their own.

I'm not! I love permissive OSS licenses, I think they're great until they get abused.

What I'm demonizing is overly powerful megacorps owning an unreasonable amount of the available "tech" revenue.

This license from MongoDB is an unfortunate side effect of that. I don't think anyone there wanted a weirdly restrictive license, but I do think they want to build a healthy business on top of their work. And that's something I want them to be able to do as well.

There's a big, big difference between companies in an oligopoly position and normal companies. Permissive OSS grew up in a world that wasn't a weird oligopoly for good reasons, but a lot has changed in the last 10 years and it's downright dangerous to license things permissively and try to build a business at the same time.

Example: we built an Edge Runtime, it's under a permissive license, if we're successful I expect we'll run into the same problem DB companies have and then have to navigate around that: https://github.com/superfly/fly

I think they're great even when they get "abused" (for that definition of "abuse" which I don't agree with).

> What I'm demonizing is overly powerful megacorps owning an unreasonable amount of the available "tech" revenue.

Whether or not that is a problem is a different discussion, but suffice to say the license change will not solve or change that. It is naive to think so.

> it's downright dangerous to license things permissively and try to build a business at the same time

Well, if you attempt to build a business on the permissively licensed thing, of course. I'm not sure I concede that building a business on permissively licensed thing, thereby changing its license, is required. Building a business around it? Developing it with funds acquired on other business? Remaining small and not growing it beyond its original development? All of these are sustainable development models too. Before being so quick to blame these "megacorps" like they did something wrong, consider whether the changes to correct this "wrong" even accomplish the goal and whether that goal has any value of being accomplished. The intent of the license change has less value than its practical effect, and the idealistic way we'd like open source to sustain itself and be profitable is not always the pragmatic one. Calling them "megacorps", saying they are the problem, saying you have no choice but to change your license, etc all of this is what I mean about the ill-perceived righteousness of license restrictions.

> Calling them "megacorps", saying they are the problem, saying you have no choice but to change your license, etc all of this is what I mean about the ill-perceived righteousness of license restrictions.

They _are_ megacorps. It's ok to be fine with megacorps, but it's a little silly to pretend they're not.

They are a problem (you can disagree with this). We'd be better off with 20 smaller companies than one large Google. More innovation, less barriers to competing, etc, etc. It's not really righteousness, righteousness is more a moral stance than an "oh shit this is a bad state we're in".

I'm not sure what planet you live on, but the GPL and other various copy-left licenses have been on the slow decline for years in part due to things like SaaS negating the use of everything but the Affero GPL and the social 'implications' of using the GPL ("poisonous", "viral"), while the use of extremely liberally-licensed, "corporate-friendly" permissive licenses has skyrocketed.

You don't have to look far (I've seen it more than once) to find people submitting issues on places like GitHub to completely relicense a project, just because it was GPL. Even here, every time a piece of code with a GPL license is attached and posted, you can be certain of someone pointing this out.

There are technical factors involved (like what's the deal with JavaScript licensing), but ultimately less projects choose the GPL -- or any other "demanding" copy-left license -- than ever before, so I have no idea what you're talking about, other than a perceived persecution complex where you think people are trying to "stop you" from using their code?

Of course, the funny thing is you say we need to stop "demonizing" restrictionless development, and of all copyleft licenses, the Affero GPL actually has risen in usage. But that's not because there's a big mean group of copy-leftists making people do it through blackmail. It's because it's risen in usage in corporate-sponsored, open-core projects, precisely to disincentivize systems like large, already-rich SaaS companies sucking the money out of their core customers by requiring them to share the source code for their changes (which they are often unable to do, making it effective). Corporations that sell open source software exactly understand how this game works -- they don't want other companies directly eating away the bulk of their revenue streams by just slapping a stupid UX and some user management patches on top, and so they license their software in an appropriate manner to try to cover all bases (source available, but without already-geared-up companies eating away their direct lifelines).

You'll also notice most of the companies doing this strategy aren't already highly-powerful, highly-monied SaaS companies. They're often much smaller and starting off, trying to get their software in the hands of users, while retaining revenue leads. Highly powerful companies like Google can afford to just release everything under non-copyleft licenses like Apache or MIT. They can subsidize the development of the software through established business.

But I imagine most people on this website wouldn't see these companies as being "copy-left righteous", only "protecting their investment". Unsurprisingly, this kind of understanding doesn't seem to extend to individual developers who license their code under a copyleft licenses (who are "righteous", and have no reason to care about anything other than the most people possible using their software).

Maybe the "copy-left" righteousness you're seeing isn't a massive proliferation of copy-left licensing, but actually a result of people getting wise to the way this conversation plays out. After all, if I'm going to be accused of being righteous, I might as well use the GPL, since apparently anything less than a free-for-all isn't acceptable to a lot of people.

The planet that recognizes that proclaimed righteousness (what I wrote about) has nothing to do with adoption (what you wrote about). If anything it makes the righteousness stick out because it goes against what people are choosing. I rarely see GPL devs demonized for how they choose to give their code away, or blog posts and evangelists espousing anti-GPL, or the straggling person "eventually coming out and calling it poisonous", or justifications on non-GPL changes as claiming corporate harm.

I have no statement on license prevalence and it is unrelated to my comment. My statement is about justification used and being overly prideful of their work. Change and be done. One way is not necessarily better than another, and companies are not all bad, and that's not only who you are hurting with these changes, etc. But when I hear complaints about the company using up all their hard work like it's some zero-sum coffer being depleted, I don't pity them. I know the intent is guilt and I don't think it's a good look.

This is simply not true in any meaningful way. Please cite real data. It's very hard to disagree with handwaving like this.

Both Google's official policy (which is super clear about this: https://opensource.google.com/docs/), and practice (releasing and working on tens of thousands of open source projects) say otherwise.

I would love to see the data that goes with this claim.

What you're saying is (I think): Google contributes code + projects back to the OSS community and sponsors OSS organizations.

I think if we could see the actual numbers — if it were possible to see Google's cloud revenue with associated OSS contributions — we'd see that what they're actually giving "back" is tiny, and it's the equivalent of donating to charities.

Since we don't know how many people actually work on OSS at Google, we can maybe use this estimate: https://twitter.com/mjasay/status/960563592683667456

Assuming Google pays ~$250k salaries to all of those folks to work full time on other peoples' projects, they're spending about $500mm/year on OSS while making ~$2bn/yr on just Google cloud. And that's horribly optimistic, I doubt much of that money is going to projects Google doesn't control.

Google's original OSS projects are different, I tend to like them. But given Google's market power the actual effect is to commoditize all the things Google doesn't expect to make money on. Kubernetes is great. Mesosphere is increasingly irrelevant because of it. OSS projects from megacorps tend to have the same effect as price dumping. They can afford to spend more money making something an non-viable business than most companies can spend at all.

AGPL was a roundabout way of hinting that cloud providers should kick back some revenue and now that it didn't work the truth can come out.

How does AGPL force kicking back of revenue? The only way I can think of is if the cloud-provider choose to relicense the software (for a fee), because they can always fulfill the terms of the AGPL by publishing all their changes without paying a dime.

This is false. Seriously - i'm not sure why people on HN like to offer things as facts that they simply aren't ever going to know about.

Google in fact does pay companies that developed open source software that Google relies upon.

Why does this debate consyantly flare up again and again? No one is exploiting licenses, if you release something as open source then it’s open source, amongst other things you give up any claim to the money others might make using your software. That is your choice, any no one is exploiting you or your work by using the software within the license you granted them.

People need to stop this attempt at having “financially closed” open source. If you want you software to be propriataty and have limitations on usage just do that. Don’t release it as open source and cry fowl when other treat it like that instead of treating it like you had a proprietary license on it.

Any other company (like Compose) can do the same thing and there are several hundred vendors offering various options. MongoDB Atlas is entirely this, and seems to be doing well by leveraging their own expertise and moving faster than the others.

If MongoDB now wants to change the license then they're free to do so, but they'll face the consequences of becoming more proprietary with their offering. It may help or it may hurt, but there's not some big universal argument to be made. If you don't want to make and give away free stuff, then don't. The rest of the world will still manage just fine.

Obviously the service is managed and that has value, regardless of the backend and your opinions on how they run it. Perhaps your issue is with all the customers who want and pay for this rather than providers meeting a need.

Have you seen the degree of investment Microsoft has made lately in Open Source? It's an upside-down world where Microsoft if a bigger champion -- and funder -- of open source than a company like Google which was built on Open Source software.

Google has released roughly every meaningful patch it has made to the open source software it was built on[1].

As for funding, that's definitely not true by the numbers last i looked (and definitely was not true in the past).

Without concrete disagreements, this is just handwaving. So if you make some, i'm happy to argue with real data.

[1] The only cases i can think of that this isn't true is when the Googler who worked on it left before they got a chance to do that (and nobody has picked it up since)

Chrome or Android seem like good counterexamples, where the software that most people use (Chrome, or Android + Google Experience) is specifically kept in two separate buckets, open source and closed source, so that Google can strategically keep some parts open and some parts closed.

The original complaint was about taking other people's open source (mongodb) without contributing back. Not "failing to release stuff it made itself". That's a completely different thing.

Even there, what i said is still true: Google has released every meaningful patch to the open source software it used in making Chrome/Android.

Like any sane kernel team, google tries to minimize it's difference with upstream since it has huge maintenance cost.

Microsoft gets all the news because it's a drastic change from normal behaviour.

Amazon, Google, Oracle et all just keep steadily contributing stuff. A lot of the work is also deadly boring and not headline capturing stuff.

Few simple queries to show the work they're doing just on the kernel:

Amazon: https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/lin...

Google: https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/lin...

Microsoft: https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/lin...

Oracle: https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/lin...

Until communities refuse to sign CLA that let projects bait-and-switch to another license once they have a large community and want to now take buckets of VC money.

It's totally rational to create a license model that prevents hosting to third parties, but still allows end users to adopt the technology without paying. As has been pointed out elsewhere, that may not be right for all OS projects, but it should be an option.

Aren't you glad it isn't you! ;-)