[Illniyar]

I can understand the sentiment and realize the need to monetize, it's hard when others take your code and make more money out of it then you (which I am assuming is the case).

But even if they are right, this doesn't seem smart, it feels like a knee jerk reaction. I imagine that they hope that by doing this they'll cause people who are using mongo on other providers to move to mongolabs, since there is 0 chance of these providers open sourcing their infra.

But that's not whats going to happen, either cloud providers will remain with old versions and people will gradually move to different dbs or they'll just fork it, they certainly have the manpower for it, this will give them incentive.

Frankly though I think this is well within the agpl, cloud providers aren't modifying the code they are building things around it.

[51lver]

> it's hard when others take your code and make more money out of it then you

Just my opinion, of course, but I think this is only true for sales and management types who are profit driven. For engineers and artists, it's not really an issue. We want to see our best work appreciated, primarily.

[toomuchtodo]

> For engineers and artists, it's not really an issue. We want to see our best work appreciated, primarily.

I want to be paid first. Everything else comes second. That doesn't not make me an engineer. It makes me a wise engineer. Money buys options and freedom. Prestige and other abstract concepts are used to steal your time and value.

[51lver]

Right, but you aren't going to raise hell if someone makes more money on your work than you did. That's not the attitude of a craftsman, but business folks think in terms of lost potential revenue and junk like that and thus are not above such things.

[Dylan16807]

It's okay if they make 'more' money, but whenever an entity makes giant piles of money I wish there was a small mandatory royalty to the original creators.

[Arcsech]

All the engineers I know still want a paycheck every two weeks. Engineers aren’t (and shouldn’t be!) all Above All This - sure, it’s great to make something and give it away just to help the community, but you still gotta eat.

That said, I think MongoDB REALLY screwed up the execution here, even though I can definitely sympathize with what they were aiming to accomplish.