| There are many arguments provided as justification for this new license - they seem specious in my opinion 1. Big cloud vendors are making money off MongoDB's investment
Completely untrue. The big three - AWS, Azure and GCP dont have a MongoDB as a service solution. The only commercial entity making any real money off MongoDB is MongoDB, Inc. AGPL has achieved its purpose here. The only big cloud vendor with a solution is Rackspace and they release their modified MongoDB code. 2. Big cloud Vendors in China are breaking the law and they need this new license to control them
If they are technically modifying the source code and not providing it back to the community then they are already breaking the law. You don't need a new license to control this problem So what is this about? In my opinion it is an exercise in naked extortion and control 1. Clear out any ISV Vendors/As-a-service Competitors - Any commerical entity who does anything remotely interesting with MongoDB is in big trouble. I'm talking about Monitoring, backup, performance profiling, analytics, reporting etc..anything really. MongoDB could easily bring a reasonable claim against them that the value of their service is "primarily or mostly derived from MongoDB". Also its very unclear on what needs to be open sourced to be compatible. The license seems deliberately vaguely worded so that it is as broad as possible. 2. End users using MongoDB - While MongoDB claims this does not affect end users in any way I would be very wary of this claim. The license in authored in such a generic way that there are many possible interpretations. If MongoDB, Inc for some reason does a claim against you then your only defence is to buy a license or go into litigation. "Trust us, we will never do that" is not a good enough argument. To summarize, be very wary of this. If you are a developer and dont think this affects you run this by your legal deparment or VC and see the alarm on their faces :) |