[ocdtrekkie]

That's more or less what SSPL is. The problem is the OSI and FSF are basically religious pharisees, so dedicated to their texts, they're missing the actual point. People backing the OSI/Amazon over Elastic/Mongo/etc. are literally killing open source.

[dwaite]

> People backing the OSI/Amazon over Elastic/Mongo/etc. are literally killing open source.

AGPL, the license Mongo was originally under, isn't used in reality to prevent deployed applications from hoarding changes; rather, it used to scare commercial entities away from deploying your code. With a commercial CLA providing exclusive code ownership, it allows you a legal club to block others, even other contributors, from competing against your current business interests.

It is licenses like the AGPL and commercial CLAs which have been killing open source and free software, because they destroy motivation for any significant third party contributions and the resulting emergent ecosystem around a project. It reduces the idea of open source and of free software down a lot closer (in my opinion) to source code escrow.

MongoDB didn't want any Amazon changes to be contributed to the project. They wanted to block another commercial entity from offering a service based on their IP. From an open source perspective, I don't take their side any more than I would take Amazon's.

[zozbot234]

AGPL is an actual FLOSS license though, SSPL is not. And Amazon (or any other entity) would be quite within their rights to publically deploy AGPL software as long as they merely published the changes in the deployed version. There's no requirement for such changes to be accepted by upstream.