| To quote wikipedia on the SSPL Certification with OSI "In 2018, MongoDB submitted the license to the Open Source Initiative (OSI) for approval. The company withdrew its submission in 2019.[19][20] In January 2021, following the re-licensing move by Elastic, OSI released a statement declaring that the SSPL does not comply with its Open Source Definition because it discriminates against specific fields of endeavor,[which?] describing it as a "fauxpen" source license.[7]" wikipedia links to https://opensource.org/blog/the-sspl-is-not-an-open-source-l... So it would seem your take is not quite accurate. It's not simply that it was withdrawn, the OSI board of directors has made public statements. I'd note that the argument made above "discriminating against specific fields of endeavor" is not fundamentally different than other viral copyleft licenses. While it has a big poison pill, the whole point of viral copyleft statements is about having a poison pill. The GPL arguably discriminates against fields of endeavor (i.e. closed source code, actually preventing it). The SSPL discriminates against cloud service providers by having a poison pill, which in theory, actually discriminates less, as that field is allowed to use it, just the requirements to use it might be to onerous to be reasonable. But there should be no logical difference if its just about "discriminating against specific fields of endeavor". i.e. it comes down to a value/emotional statement vs a pure logic statement. The value is that cloud providers need to be allowed to use the code without severe restriction, while its ok to prevent closed source products from using the code. It's fine for the OSI to make decisions that are not purely logical, but are simply about trying to protect the values that they want to push, but they should also be honest about it. |