[cyphar]

The license being discussed here is not the SSPL. It's the Confluent Community License, which does not have any of the GPL-like aspects you refer to. Instead it simply denies the use of the software (freedom #0) for an "Excluded Purpose" (creating a competing product to Confluent). I'm sure you'll agree this is not in any way in the original spirit of the four freedoms.

> What exactly is a "derived work", and where do you draw the line in the sand?

This is mostly determined by copyright law, since "derived work" is a legal term of art.

> If I release something as SSPL, it isn't because I'm trying to "restrict your freedoms". It's that I'm trying to prevent you from restricting other's freedoms by selling them proprietary work based on it.

This is the justification, but due to the design of the license it is de-facto impossible to actually comply with its requirements. Therefore it acts as a de-facto proprietary license. Many copyleft lawyers have stated that the license would likely require you to re-license Linux under the SSPL if you run SSPL code on a Linux server. This is not possible to do, and thus you are forced to pay MongoDB to get a business license.

Maybe there is a place for a license like the SSPL, but given how there would be effectively no company that could comply with it (even if it didn't require relicensing to SSPL, many companies have contracted code that they cannot relicense to a free software license) I fear it would have the same effect.

[kemitchell]

> Many copyleft lawyers have stated that the license would likely require you to re-license Linux under the SSPL if you run SSPL code on a Linux server.

There's no such thing as a "copyleft lawyer". Even if there were, there wouldn't be many of us, even if you counted every one, worldwide.

I personally don't agree with the reading you referred to. But if Mongo's SSPLv2, which they've submitted to OSI, is any indication, it won't be tenable much longer.