Re:MongoDB's Server Side Public License Is Likely Unenforceable
by kstrauser on Thursday October 25, 2018 @01:34PM
(#18302707)
Did Redis, Elastic, Mongo et al pay for Linux development, or glibc, or their text editors, or compilers, or ...? Why should they get the financial benefit from building on top of others' donated work - and claim to be an equal participant in the FOSS ecosystem - and then be peeved with others expect the same in return?
If Mongo were a closed, proprietary product who wanted to be paid, sure. I happily pay for Apple stuff, for instance. But saying "hey, come use our FOSS project!" and then pivoting to "...as long as you pay up!" is extremely disingenuous.
Re:MongoDB's Server Side Public License Is Likely Unenforceable
by toomuchtodo on Thursday October 25, 2018 @01:53PM
(#18302918)
Situations change. What you get for free today, you are not guaranteed to get for free tomorrow, nor should you feel entitled to continue using a tool previously provided for free.
This is absolutely no different than commercial vendors who change pricing or licensing terms year to year (ie “we no longer offer an on prem version; SaaS only now; last year you paid $100k, this year our price is $200k”). You’ve just been anchored to an unusually low price previously.
It’s clearly not mutually beneficial when one side is reaping outsized rewards (and not at all ashamed about it), and your example of small contributions to vim and python is disingenuous; we’re talking about entire software packages used without compensation by businesses (Redis, Elastic, Mongo to name a few).