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by KZerda 413 days ago
A copyleft license like the AGPL didn't stop MongoDB from rugpulling. I'd argue that the AGPL, and the copyright assignment that tends to go with it, makes it easier to rugpull because forking entities would be at an extreme disadvantage in keeping the lights on compared to the closed-sourcing company. A non-copyleft license, on the other hand, makes it much easier for a forking company to cover all the same niches as the original company, making a rugpull that much more difficult.
1 comments
NewsaHackO 413 days ago
? How did MongoDB rug pull?
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kmeisthax 412 days ago
MongoDB used to be AGPLv3. A year after their IPO they realized "aww shit, Wall Street wants continuous growth, being profitable isn't enough" and decided to migrate to a completely new license, SSPL, that's designed to put everything surrounding the software in scope of the copyleft. The implication being that if Amazon were to offer MongoDB they'd also have to release all of AWS RDS[0] as a thing you could just download and use.

The community did not like this one bit, but MongoDB doesn't need to care about what the community thinks because they had CLA'd all their contributors. That is, if you wanted something in MongoDB upstream, you had to give MongoDB full copyright ownership over the software. Which exempts them from copyleft[1]. One of the critical parts of copyleft is the "no further restrictions" rule; otherwise copyleft is just proprietary with extra steps.

[0] I don't remember if they were hosting MongoDB as part of RDS or something else.

[1] As we've seen with the Neo4J lawsuit, copyright licenses cannot tie the hands of the copyright owner. The only way for copyleft to work is to create a Mexican standoff of contributors who will sue each other to death if any one of them decides to relicense without unanimous community consensus.

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_msw_ 412 days ago
AWS never offered the AGPLv3 licensed version of the MongoDB server as part of any managed service. There were large cloud providers in China that _did_ offer MongoDB as a service. They also provided the corresponding source code [1]. Despite signs that they were complying with the obligations of the license, they had the SSPL drafted anyway.

Because once it was clear that software as a service was a compelling model, it was no longer appealing to give everyone the permissions needed to offer the software as part of a service (as AGPLv3 was always designed to do).

Changing the license seemingly worked, as a partnership was eventually announced [2].

[1] https://github.com/Tencent/CMONGO

[2] https://www.mongodb.com/company/newsroom/press-releases/tenc...

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