Last October, Eliot Horowitz, technical director and co-founder of MongoDB made an announcement which created a tumult in the open source community: the creation of a new open source license, the Server Side Public License (SSPL) for the famous Document Oriented Database Management System.
This license applies to all versions of MongoDB released or released after October 16, 2018 and replaces the AGPLv3 license. It also applies to patches for older versions of the DBMS.
In a post, Eliot Horowitz explained that this change was intended to frame the use of the DBMS as a service.
Many cloud service providers, including the largest providers, rely on DBMS source code to deliver commercial versions to users without complying with open source rules.
"The SSPL is designed to ensure that companies offering MongoDB (or any software submitted to the SSPL) as a service give back to the community."
“If you make a program feature or a modified version available to third parties as a service, the source code must be downloadable on free networks. «
So for Horowitz, the SSPL simply clarifies the terms of making the MongoDB available as a service.
“The SSPL is based on the spirit of AGPL, but clarifies the conditions for providing open source software as services.
The license renews all the freedoms that the open source community enjoyed with MongoDB under the AGPL: freedom to use, review, modify, and redistribute the software.
The only substantial change is an explicit requirement that any organization attempting to operate MongoDB as a service must open the software it uses to provide that service. This license change will not affect customers who have purchased a MongoDB commercial license, "he commented.
SSPL v1 has been submitted for review by the Open Source Initiative (OSI) but it has not yet been approved.
And the problem is ...
This means that the versions of MongoDB under this license are not open source. Another version of the license (SSPL v2) that has also been proposed barely convinces the OSI.
Para muchos, the new MongoDB SSPL license departs from the spirit of open source. For some of them, the SSPL could just agree with Steve Ballmer, the former CEO of Microsoft, when he said that the GPL license for Linux was "a cancer associated, in the sense of intellectual property, with everything it touches."
Red Hat does not want problems, things must be done well
Red Hat, for its part, also decided to remove MongoDB from some of its products.
"After review, Fedora concluded that the Server Side Public License v1 (SSPL) is not a free software license, "wrote Tom Callaway, Fedora Engineering Manager, in a note on January 15, 2019."
Fedora believes that SSPL is designed to create aggressive discrimination against a specific category of users.
Furthermore, it seems clear that the objective of the licensee is to create fear, uncertainty and doubt among commercial users of software under this license.
To consider the SSPL as "free" or "open source" casts this shadow over all other licenses in the Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) ecosystem, even if none of them pose this risk,
And even with the v2 version of the SSPL being developed, Tom Callaway believes the problem continues.
The objective is the same.
So "we have updated our list of" wrong licenses "to include SSPLv1. No software under this license can be included in Fedora, "says the Red Hat engineer.
In addition to Fedora, RHEL (Red Hat Enterprise Linux) has also decided to get rid of MongoDB in its next version.
In the RHEL 8 documentation, Red Hat removed MongoDB from the list of database servers provided with the distribution.
“RHEL 8 provides the following database servers: MySQL 8.0, MariaDB 10.3, PostgreSQL 10, PostgreSQL 9.6, and Redis 4.0.
Please note that the MongoDB NoSQL database server is not included in the beta version of RHEL 8.0 because it uses the server-side Public License (SSPL), "