[vrtx0]

Wow. Amazon is blatantly misleading people here. They know the SSPL was created specifically because MongoDB had the same issues with Amazon’s service. I worked for MongoDB. Nobody wanted the SSPL, but Amazon was relentless.

MongoDB’s cloud service offering was thriving quite well (and still is, thankfully). Then Amazon announced the exact feature set as their own service, while contributing nothing to the project. They even linked entirely to MongoDB’s comprehensive documentation. “Anticompetitive” is the kindest description I can offer of Amazon’s behavior.

Just remember —- the SSPL and similar licenses are still completely open source. Amazon knows they’re forcing companies to change licenses, but shaming them as being “unacceptable to many in the open source community”.

This is political rhetoric, and I’m shocked anybody outside of Amazon would support this. The people who started these projects and surrounding businesses are generally very good people — I’ve been disabled with a neurological condition for 6 years now, but live can afford to live relatively comfortably thanks to the people at MongoDB. And I contributed code to the project before I started working for them (10gen at the time). So I’m admittedly biased, but it really seems like Amazon has become the Trump of Silicon Valley. I’m done with political rhetoric like this.

All opinions are my own.

[smokey_circles]

> Amazon is blatantly misleading people here

I'm not so sure I agree about that, presuming you're talking about the open source comments. If not, you can ignore the rest of the comment (except the last paragraph, pertinent question for you)

The SSPL is not an open source license [0], and that's all there is to it.

There must be a better version of it out there somewhere. Something to the tune of "use our software as you wish, however you may not offer it as a hosted solution without a license from us. This license entitles you to direct support and other goodies to justify such a stance".

I can't think of those "other" goodies but that's why I'm not a business type :D

I don't think I'm making a crazy statement here, am I? Maybe I'm just being young and naive. Can you shed some light on your experience with trying to work with Amazon to address the problems? I imagine they didn't listen (they're just too big to care it seems), but I'd like some first-hand experience to gauge with.

[0]: https://opensource.org/node/1099

[vrtx0]

If time permits, please read through thread in the “SSPLv2 being withdrawal by its stewards” section. Specifically, the SaaS grab Eliot mentions.

Unfortunately I wasn’t involved in the discussions with Amazon, so I don’t want to speculate on details or mislead anybody. I can say that MongoDB absolutely had a relationship with Amazon prior the SaaS grab. I believe Amazon was the largest deployment target for MDB’s cloud service (which runs on most major cloud platforms).

That said, the reason I say Amazon is blatantly misleading people is that the authors of the blog post chose a definition of “open source” that fits their argument against Elastic. They state companies that use SSPL software may have to give up their entire source code, which simply isn’t the case. It’s not even as restrictive as the GPL (the FSF has a different definition of open source). Please note that the OSI doesn’t consider any GPL license open source.

Honestly, the only accurate definition of open source is that the source code is available to the public. That means we can modify the software, learn from it, etc. With the SSPL, you can even run a customized Elastic or MongoDB server to support any business needs unless your business is providing said software as a service and making money from it. Even then, all you have to do is release the code that runs said software as a service...

Amazon is claiming that you’d have to release your code even if you’re using the product for your game, social network, analytics app, etc. That’s just not true.

For the record, I wish everything could be under a permissive MIT or BSD-style license. But companies like Oracle, Microsoft (in the 90s) and Amazon felt entitled to destroy open projects that competed with their own. Hence the wide variety of open source licenses that now exist.

My first kernel commit was 2004, and while I don’t think anybody can own the term “open source”, I feel like I’ve been part of the open source community for ~20 years now. IMHO, Amazon is by far the least open source friendly company out there. They never contributed a single commit to MongoDB (at least while I was there), yet made money off their own SaaS, and even directed their users to MongoDB’s documentation.

Hope that clarifies my stance (and frustration) a bit...