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by bad_user
2707 days ago
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Businesses have to survive in a competitive market, I get it, you don't have to apologize for it and it's not greed, it's just how the market works. That said, you did not work with OSI or the FSF before changing the license. And your company is not the only contributor to MongoDB, you have third party contributors as well, who did not have a say in it, because of the copyright attribution that you require. In other words, you did not collaborate with OSI or the FSF and you screwed your contributors. It's good that you're now waiting on feedback from OSI, but the damage to the FOSS ecosystem was already done. |
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You certainly have a point about our not working with the OSI prior to issuing the SSPL. All other things being equal, we would like to have, but as a publicly traded company it's just not responsible to announce "we will be changing our license... to... something... we'll get back to you on what that'll be... sometime."
We weren't happy about it, but we're doing the best we can given the constraints. We're all grownups, and accept that one of the consequences is that some in the OSS community feel betrayed by that change, but we ask that you let our actions going forward, not the worst suspicions of those most predisposed to judge us harshly, determine what you think of our dedication to OSS and our community.
As for non-employee contributors to the MongoDB codebase (who account for about 3% of the codebase), I think we should credit them with the same adult responsibility for their actions as we hold MongoDB to. Their contributions were made in full knowledge of the attribution requirement, and we have no reason to believe -- and no evidence -- that they resent anything MongoDB as a company has done.