There's no point in, or place for, spirit of the system vs letter of the system discussions or calls to morality. Mongo does not deserve to survive / exist if it can't make it's offering better than a competitors.
Would Mongo even exist as a company if it had launched as a contract only vendor? Pretty much not... so it can't demand to play both sides.
Oh the irony. Open source is just a development model, while Free Software, if anything, it meant to provide freedom to all users, not just business.
Reinforcing the public cloud oligopoly only reduces such freedom.
Well, write the licenses and let's see what traction they get. I'll wager that they will be shot down by pretty much everyone
Judging on your other comments, it doesn't look like you're familiar with MongoDB's historical shoddiness. I don't agree with you on practice in this case or any case. If MongoDB's company can't out-execute, then they should have never made their product open source to begin with (and in that case it probably would never have gotten as popular as it did). That's the bargain you have to make to try and monetize open source software -- you don't just get a business for free.
But beyond that, I don't agree with you on principle in this case, because I have nothing but disdain and scorn for MongoDB. Both MySQL and Postgres have fine support for unstructured data now, and provide the entire relational toolchest as well. That's not even getting into other multi-paradigm databases like CockroachDB or ArangoDB. I struggle to think of a use case that it is more appropriate for than another option; and indeed, every time I have had to deal with it in production, I have never thought that it was anything but a poor decision.
That’s bit harsh. MongoDB has its uses. Denormalized data struture make it very easy to scale for example. Being able to use JS everywhere is nice too.
That switches the subject from “do they add value?” to ”are they the first?”.
I would think the existence of other companies offering something similar is an indication that it adds value.
However, MongoDB selected a free and open source license. This was always in the cards. They went with AGPL to keep the source maximally open for end users, but that never protected their revenue stream. (Some JS SDK companies used it for that purpose, where it makes some sene, but a DB is very different.)
But if they had started with something proprietary uptake would have been very likely much less. And people would have continued to use mysql or Cassandra if they really needed something "webscale".
So they are trying to eat their cake and have it too.
I sort of agree with their sentiment, but of course they are late to the have-cake-will-have-it-and-eaten-it-too party, as now AWS was able to fork the last AGPL-ed version and be done with it.
Even if MongoDB goes out of business, or becomes less popular AWS benefits as they can keep selling to these "legacy" customers their super-stable AWSgoDB, and said customers will just eat it all up without thinking.
If only they had! But MongoDB is 1% technology and 99% marketing, they had no technological moat to speak of.
See also: Docker.