1. Big cloud vendors are making money off MongoDB's investment Completely untrue. The big three - AWS, Azure and GCP dont have a MongoDB as a service solution. The only commercial entity making any real money off MongoDB is MongoDB, Inc. AGPL has achieved its purpose here. The only big cloud vendor with a solution is Rackspace and they release their modified MongoDB code.

2. Big cloud Vendors in China are breaking the law and they need this new license to control them If they are technically modifying the source code and not providing it back to the community then they are already breaking the law. You don't need a new license to control this problem

So what is this about? In my opinion it is an exercise in naked extortion and control

1. Clear out any ISV Vendors/As-a-service Competitors - Any commerical entity who does anything remotely interesting with MongoDB is in big trouble. I'm talking about Monitoring, backup, performance profiling, analytics, reporting etc..anything really. MongoDB could easily bring a reasonable claim against them that the value of their service is "primarily or mostly derived from MongoDB". Also its very unclear on what needs to be open sourced to be compatible. The license seems deliberately vaguely worded so that it is as broad as possible.

2. End users using MongoDB - While MongoDB claims this does not affect end users in any way I would be very wary of this claim. The license in authored in such a generic way that there are many possible interpretations. If MongoDB, Inc for some reason does a claim against you then your only defence is to buy a license or go into litigation. "Trust us, we will never do that" is not a good enough argument.

To summarize, be very wary of this. If you are a developer and dont think this affects you run this by your legal deparment or VC and see the alarm on their faces :)

Let say you are a young startup building a cool SaaS solution. E.g. A data analytics solution. If you make heavy use of MongoDB it is very possible that down the line the good folks at MongoDB come calling since "the value of your SaaS derives primarily from MongoDB..." So at that point you have two options - buy a license from MongoDB or open source your work (which they can conveniently leverage at no cost).

Either way if you are SaaS solution doing anything data related I would not use MongoDB having read this license.

It's obvious that several people disagree, but within this thread, conversing about this article, we should expect a bias to see things that way. I hope you'll stay open to being convinced otherwise. The SSPL has been submitted for review to the OSI, and this issue is one of the points of discussion that we're listening very closely to.

If that were true they could switch to Postgres and become 200x as valuable overnight.

It makes complete sense if its purpose is to be so onerous that no one can actually use it without a commercial license.

That’s virtually the word-for-word conclusion that anyone who’s “has some time to look at mongoDB” has come to. It’s a steaming pile of feces, and this is no surprise. From day one, the mongo team has made it clear that they are a startup first (in the sense of “focus on wooing investors with buzzwords and making money”) and a software engineering firm last.

Because of its previous license, the code base can be forked as of immediately before the license change, and it can continue to be offered under the previous license.

I would recommend that anyone using MongoDB do that.

Can you elaborate on this?

GPL steers clear of non-derived work. If you use VMWare on Linux, VMWare is not a derived work as far as copyright law is concerned and there is no relation between them as far as GPL is concerned.

This SSPL, is another story.