[nevi-me]

No. If you take MongoDB and offer it as SaaS, the additional software that's part of your offering, such as monitoring, backup solutions, etc, have to be open-sourced, or you have to make their code available (since the chair of OSI defines what's open source).

[fatbird]

I just had a call with MongoDB sales yesterday, and specifically asked if the licence changes impacts us, where we use Mongo as a datastore for our application, but we're not offering Mongo itself as a service. They were very quick and clear to say that the change is about those providers offering Mongo itself as a service. Using mongo in your stack to provide your service is not implicated at all.

The only grey area I see is if you offered some sort of database-as-a-service backed by Mongo but not explicitly sold as Mongo-as-a-service.

[michaelcampbell]

This makes sense, and I believe you, but lawyers being lawyers, I don't think any corporate legal team is going to even bother with trying. Easier to say "no".

Source: 1 data point; the company I work for's legal team just said "no".

[fatbird]

Same fight here, but we're digging in our heels and bothering to convince the internal lawyer that it's not a problem. We'll win, but it takes time we'd rather not have to spend.

[gaius]

We'll win, but it takes time we'd rather not have to spend.

In a fraction of the time, you could convert to Postgres, with the added bonus that doing so will also be massively more fun than arguing with lawyers. Below, you mention professionalism too.

[DannyBee]

What mongo says on a sales call is not going to be found usable in court.

[fatbird]

The odds of anyone here ending up in court over licence terms for using Mongo as part of their backend, are so vanishingly small that to actually decide against Mongo on the basis of that chance amounts to professional malpractice.

[Illniyar]

For now. Their intent can change. Or they can be bought by oracle.

Always consider license changes based on the possibility of the company being bought by oracle, there should be a law about it!

[gnulinux]

Yes this also came up with my coworkers when we were discussing this. It's better to treat every software license as strict and malicious as possible because everyone can be eventually bought by Oracle and Oracle can sue you for misusing "their" license.

[gaius]

those providers offering Mongo itself as a service

I can’t think of a single Mongo-as-a-service provider apart from Mongo themselves. None of the major clouds do it, neither do the also-rans like IBM or Oracle. So I call shenanigans on them.

[sorokod]

Statemens made by sales, are they legally binding?

[appleflaxen]

Thanks for the explanation! That makes sense.

So... why does the blog post argue that it's unenforceable?

My understanding is that they are saying "you can't use copyright to enforce something that isn't part of a creative work".

If that's an accurate version of their argument, then why not? The agreement is a contract with copyright as one side of the equation, and some behavior on the other side. Why wouldn't you be able offer a license for a creative work contingent upon things unrelated to a derivative work?