Re:MongoDB Wire Protocol Specification License
by calvinlh on Wednesday July 21, 2021 @01:02PM
(#27908915)
If the "You may not use the material for commercial purposes" clause applies to the wire protocol itself, does MongoDB itself get an exception to that for Atlas/MongoDB Enterprise?
Re:MongoDB Wire Protocol Specification License
by tyingq on Wednesday July 21, 2021 @01:05PM
(#27908965)
The copyright owner/holder can do whatever they want. That's essentially how you're able to have things like Gitlab Enterprise or CockroachDB Enterprise use their open source base in an extended not-open-source premium product.
It does require you manage outside contributions to the open source part carefully and get approval for those contributions to land in the not-open-source part.
Re:MongoDB Wire Protocol Specification License
by laurowyn on Wednesday July 21, 2021 @01:09PM
(#27909005)
The license is for the published version available publicly only. There's no reason why it can't be separately licensed to an individual/entity to grant commercial use on a case by case basis. This is no different from negotiating a contract - the license defines the terms under which you are allowed to use the provided software.
And if there is a differently-licenses _implementation_ of the protocol, one would assume that it is possible to implement (or just use directly) that implementation without any reliance on this specific specification document.
In other words: IANAL but I don't think this will accomplish what they want (which is Amazon re-implementing a wire-compatible-with-MongoDB database)
As an example: I (probably) can't scan and redistribute an entire cookbook, but I can bake cookies from a recipe in the cookbook and sell them.