It doesn't seem squishy to me insofar as you can't offer Mongo as a service and then swap Mongo out for a different product, while leaving your offering unchanged.
Any app using Mongo simply as a datastore on the backend can swap it out without altering their offering.
> Imagine that the author is hired by a large evil corporation and, now in their thrall, attempts to do the worst to the users of the program: to make their lives miserable, to make them stop using the program, to expose them to legal liability, to make the program non-free, to discover their secrets, etc. The same can happen to a corporation bought out by a larger corporation bent on destroying free software in order to maintain its monopoly and extend its evil empire. The license cannot allow even the author to take away the required freedoms!
If MongoDB does not say in a legally binding way that this is clearly not what they mean, an acquirer could very likely twist the clause.
it also really doesn't sound like "if you use MongoDB in your streamingplatform/blog/whatever you need to opensource everything, which seems to be the gripe many a commenter is having.
Maybe. If there's more lines of code in the Mongo part than the other part, is the value "primarily" Mongo? What if I made a file upload/download site? Mongo might constitute the bulk of the value/lines of code/whatever.
Words like "primarily" and "including, without limitation" make lawyers nervous.
That depends on how you think a court would weigh the source of value of your offering; and any factor that makes MongoDB more valuable as a component before considering the license makes it more risky when you consider the license.
That sounds pretty squishy and likely to be broader than just the use case of offering Mongo as a service.