[tinco]

I'm not familiar with the Elastic ecosystem, but both MongoDB and Redis have a great plenty of competitors, many of which implement the same wire protocols even, that don't make use of their license at all. So I don't think symmetric competition is affected or even a concern of these companies. Symmetric competition still drives them to improve quality and pressure prices.

It's the asymmetric competition from the platforms that's siphoning resources from these companies that could have been spent on improving the core product.

I don't understand your point with regards to Source Available licenses. Sure, source available is beneficial to the end user, but what does that have to do with open source licenses and the OSI? Source available licenses are simply irrelevant. If source available licenses need representation there should be a new organisation formed for them, no need to involve the OSI. You could call it the Source Available Initiative.

[compsciphd]

The SSPL is more than just source available. Except for the anti-competitive poison pill in it, its effectively the same as rights granted under the GPL. It's just taking the GPL viral nature to its ultimate extent.

As a simple thought experiment outside the cloud space (or in the pre cloud times) on how the GPL is just as "anti-competitive"

I can release code as GPL. Lets assume either I am the only contributor to this code or I have a CLA allowing me extra rights to the code. In that case, only I have the right to use that GPLd code in a closed source product. That's fundamentally not any more "anti-competitive" or "discriminatory" than the SSPL. Just like the GPL would have allow you to use my code in your commercial product shipped to customers, as long as you GPLd the entire code base (which many might find untenable), so to the SSPL allows you to use a "service" oriented code base, as long as you open source the entire service structure that delivers your version of the service to the end user.

As I wrote above, its mostly a question on values and how one emotionally reacts to those values than simple logic. As the arguments made against the SSPL (or at least a theoretically more perfect SSPL type license, as the emotionally arguments against the SSPL have created an environment where there has been no desire to improve it) really apply just as equally to the GPL.