Anyone can provide Postgres, MySQL or other open source databases as a service.
For this reason, there are many providers to choose from, and there is a healthy amount of innovation and competition in the space. Prices are set by market and demand, as it should be.
And then there is MongoDB where only a handful of providers could negotiate a license, and the price is set by MongoDB Inc.
In my opinion this is by no means "fine" from a user perspective as we are talking about database software.
If anyone did freeriding, it is MongoDB Inc. who chose to freeride on the open source community for marketing purposes, before switching to SSPL.
It is the opposite. Amazon would have released MongoDB as a service, same as they do for PostgreSQL or MySQL. As MongoDB changed license they implemented DocumentDB instead.
Note AWS significantly contributes to PostgreSQL and MySQL communities (though you could always want even more) but of course does not to MongoDB. While this is fine for MongoDB Inc I think it is not great for MongoDB community at large
What's nice about Postgres is there's a ton of Postgres compatible products that do scale for the 10% who actually need it. And it's still all just Postgres / SQL.
Nosql is a fun target to beat up on of late. But there are good, even infamous, reasons to avoid SQL. Particular if you want to accomplish flexible record queries from untrusted clients.
All you do is poop all over the story about postgres. I'm convinced that no use cases will convince you of anything. I'm not really looking to involve myself in a database holy war.
Is jsonb in Postgres not flexible enough? I dump external json in there all the time (like large API responses). The jsonb operators work well. And there's an escape hatch that lets you easily convert json to a table. And importantly, you get indexes with Postgres.
MongoDB’s SSPL is neither an open source license[1] nor, most likely, a free software one[2]. Its definition of offering the licensed software as a service is so broad most Linux distributions[3–6] flat out refuse to ship MongoDB (not even in a nonfree repository or the equivalent) so as to (among other things) avoid placing the operators of their package mirrors in legal jeopardy.
"It should be noted that the new license maintains all of the same freedoms the community has always had with MongoDB under AGPL - they are free to use, review, modify, and redistribute the source code. The only changes are additional terms that make explicit the conditions for offering a publicly available MongoDB as a service.
Obviously, this new license helps our business, but it is also important for the MongoDB community. MongoDB has invested over $300M in R&D over the past decade to offer an open database for everyone, and with this change, MongoDB will continue to be able to aggressively invest in R&D to drive further innovation and value for the community."
Really? How many open source databases do you offer? Some may say it’s not right for randos to complain when you give something away and they complain that it’s missing basics. I just happy someone else wrote most of what I need and I can extend it if needed.
I think it only hurts people who want to freeride the project and extend it for selfish personal gains. That's OK by me.