I think it was specifically Amazon not releasing their changes.
Maybe AGPL would cover them and force the release, but if Amazon stuck their heals down it would be an expensive legal fight. My guess is that it was just easier to change the licence used going forward to one that is more explicit and unambiguous about the matter.
It was my understanding that AGPL was supposed to cover this specific type of use, so would also be interested in know if there is a real problem or if the licence change was simply to make the point without needing to go lawyer-to-lawyer with someone in possession of Amazon's resources.
I'd actually be kind of surprised if Amazon did actually use it - most of the big tech companies are allergic to AGPL, and e.g. Google does not allow it to be used at all, even internally.
> I'd actually be kind of surprised if Amazon did actually use it
They did, which is how this discussion started.
Until 4.0.4 / 4.1.5 MondoDB was released under the AGPL licence. Upon those releases it switched to SSPL (which IIRC is APL plus extra "commons clauses"). Amazon have stopped using MongoDB as they do not want to (or for some reason are unable to) abide by this new license, but had previously been happy to use the code under [their interpretation of] AGPLv3.
I haven't seen a source clearly saying that Amazon had been using MongoDB - I thought the DocumentDB release last week was the first MongoDB product they offered?
EDIT: and searching HN comments, there's multiple people claiming AGPL is entirely banned inside Amazon too
In which case I don't see why this is such a big issue. Amazon couldn't use it before the change because of their licence use policy, and can't after the change either. So the change represents no change in that respect.
Implementing an interface compatible with something that you can't use for licensing reasons is no biggie. Other projects, Free/free/OS/commercial, do that sort of thing all the time.
I wonder where the problem that drove the change actually was... RH dropping it from their distro is an issue related to the licence change, but I don't get the impression that was the intended target.
I should probably find time to dig back into the details, as I feel I've missed something notable.
Maybe AGPL would cover them and force the release, but if Amazon stuck their heals down it would be an expensive legal fight. My guess is that it was just easier to change the licence used going forward to one that is more explicit and unambiguous about the matter.
It was my understanding that AGPL was supposed to cover this specific type of use, so would also be interested in know if there is a real problem or if the licence change was simply to make the point without needing to go lawyer-to-lawyer with someone in possession of Amazon's resources.