Good on these guys, I hope they build a licensing model or some other thing that can stand up to Amazon. I still consider SSPL to be "free software" very much within the ideals that movement, regardless of what the OSI says.
Yeah, I think the issue is that these days there's a lot of open source developers, who zealously believe in open source, but are working for corporations. They have a natural incentive to maximize the usefulness of open source for corporations, whether they explicitly acknowledge that or not. On a social level, I think that's having many effects, one of which is the backlash against SSPL, which is obviously hard for mostly-proprietary corporations to comply with.
Many open source programmers have built a mental model around the notion that the scripts that operate and deploy an application (service) aren't part of the application (service), and therefore don't need to be open source. But that doesn't make any sense from a software-freedom perspective! The fundamental tenets of open source are that users should be able to use, modify, and redistribute the application. If the users don't have access to the scripts that are required to actually deploy a modified version of the service, then it's not meaningfully open source. That's a new perspective, it's true, but I think the old perspective (the scripts to deploy a service don't need to be open sourced) was just wrong, it came from a long period of biased, commercial-centric thinking.
SSPL is less free than most of propertiary EULAs. It is literally impossible to comply with the section 13 of the license.
SSPL requires the user to release the source code of everything they are using to host their service and license it under the terms of SSPL. Everything, that even includes operating system and firmware of the server used to host the user's service. No one is able to do that.
I don't understand how can anyone defend that awful license.
IMHO all use cases can probably be covered by MIT/BSD, GPL, LGPL, and AGPL. Everything else is license proliferation and adds confusion and problems sharing code between projects.
Hence, the need for a new license.
However, they seem to have kept the deployment infrastructure as a trade secret, and since that didn't interact directly with MongoDB's interfaces, it șes that it really didn't come under the scope of the AGPL.
I think another commenter got it right: this is a fuss created by commercial entities that wanted to have their cake and eat it too.
Because they were already using the AGPL, and it did precisely Nothing to stop Amazon from turning into a massive free-rider who undermined the very ability of the project to fund continued development of the project Amazon was free-riding on.
We can attempt to solve this free rider problem, or we can shrug our shoulders and decide we’re just comfortable with a world with a lot of dead Open Source projects and a lot more proprietary software. But “the current situation is fine and sustainable” is head-in-sand thinking. This Bad Citizen behaviour is an existential threat to the long term prospects of Open Source.
There is no "free rider" problem. There are companies competing and one of them out competing the other. Are you as vocal about every company who failed because they didn't have a good business plan?
Now, should companies (or anyone) who use f/oss contribute back in kind or monetarily? Yes, of course they should; no one is arguing that.
Open source was born out of a closed source world. It couldn't possibly have been a "gift culture" at that time, and yet it birthed and blossomed and amazingly so. To seriously believe open source would go away requires a belief that the forces that birthed it in the first place no longer exist or have significantly diminished. I'd be interesed to hear you expound on that.
This state of affairs continued through the initial phases of the workstation/PC era. It was when IBM PC clone hardware (with their narrower profit margins) started to dominate that proprietary software gained more attractive margins, and the ISV era really took off.
It was this growth of proprietary software cutting into and threatening the existing gift-culture during the 80s that prompted the formation of Free Software and Open Source philosophies (the latter named in the 90s but existing all along).
The hard reality, that someone like myself believes, is that open source works because most actors try to be considerate of others. It falls apart when everyone acts selfishly. I personally believe the world is better off because we have open source software(as generally defined by the OSI and other groups). So my concern, and I'm guessing the concern of others like the author of this article, is about losing open source as we know it today. The fear is that as actors like Amazon behave in a very anti-social and self interested way, other actors in the ecosystem will be drawn into behaving similarly. Eventually we'll return to the era when software was almost always closed.
Of course, you may not find any real value in the spread of open source software. If that is the case, then I would imagine this situation seems strange to you.
[1] http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/homestead...