That’s how they’re trying to sell it. But why did Elastic and Redis drop SSPL if it was so good, and why did OSI not accept it as open source?
The answers are here but the TLDR is that SSPL is vague and, as a consequence, makes it risky to provide a service with the product, unless you are large enough to make a big lucrative deal with the owner of the product.
This stifles competition and innovation.
Case in point: Mongo DBAs are nearly non-existent outside California and managed MongoDB is much more expensive than managed PostgreSQL/MariaDB services, because it is only offered by 3 providers.
Limiting the number of provider is exactly the point. You either pay the developers or make your code available.
I don’t know about Elastic, but redis was accepting contributions so changing the license was very controversial, if not legally questionable. AFAIK mongodb, like sqlite, don’t accept contributions.
Big lucrative deal? Just buy a license, like tens of thousands of others do, millions if we include other “code available” products that also offer licenses: red hat, Ubuntu, temporal, different Kafka versions, Postgres, MySQL, etc.
I think you are confusing a license to use “enterprise edition” yourself, with a “license to provide the product (as a service) to customers”, as is required under SSPL.
SSPL is not AGPL: you can never be sure you comply with “or make your code available” due to the way this is worded. Please read https://www.ssplisbad.com/ before arguing that it is the same as AGPL.
That website is quite full of FUD based on misunderstanding the license text and zero legal, court tested evidence. Nobody has asked anyone to provide the BIOS for your Dell computer. The FAQ at Elastic license page for instance, clears a lot of the misconceptions (falsehoods). Same with mongodbs. Same with redis.
SSPL is not AGPL and I never claimed it was, I said it’s the next step GPL -> AGPL - > SSPL, with stronger and stonger copyleft protections. From distribution, to modified usage over a network, to unmodified usage, offering “as service”.
If AWS wants to use my code for another yacht for bezos, they can either pay me or open the source for their code, just the same as I did. Contribute, fork the project or gtfo. And there are many forks of every SSPL project, so no problem there.
Every SSPL product I know is dual licensed, you can use either SSPL or some kind of enterprise license that allows you to do whatever you want, as long as you pay the required fees. Once you go enterprise the SSPL does not apply to you. See alibaba for instance, offering both elastic and mongodb as a service with no issue and no code made available.
That’s how they’re trying to sell it. But why did Elastic and Redis drop SSPL if it was so good, and why did OSI not accept it as open source? The answers are here but the TLDR is that SSPL is vague and, as a consequence, makes it risky to provide a service with the product, unless you are large enough to make a big lucrative deal with the owner of the product.
This stifles competition and innovation.
Case in point: Mongo DBAs are nearly non-existent outside California and managed MongoDB is much more expensive than managed PostgreSQL/MariaDB services, because it is only offered by 3 providers.
https://www.ssplisbad.com/
Limiting the number of provider is exactly the point. You either pay the developers or make your code available.
I don’t know about Elastic, but redis was accepting contributions so changing the license was very controversial, if not legally questionable. AFAIK mongodb, like sqlite, don’t accept contributions.
Big lucrative deal? Just buy a license, like tens of thousands of others do, millions if we include other “code available” products that also offer licenses: red hat, Ubuntu, temporal, different Kafka versions, Postgres, MySQL, etc.
I think you are confusing a license to use “enterprise edition” yourself, with a “license to provide the product (as a service) to customers”, as is required under SSPL.
SSPL is not AGPL: you can never be sure you comply with “or make your code available” due to the way this is worded. Please read https://www.ssplisbad.com/ before arguing that it is the same as AGPL.
That website is quite full of FUD based on misunderstanding the license text and zero legal, court tested evidence. Nobody has asked anyone to provide the BIOS for your Dell computer. The FAQ at Elastic license page for instance, clears a lot of the misconceptions (falsehoods). Same with mongodbs. Same with redis.
SSPL is not AGPL and I never claimed it was, I said it’s the next step GPL -> AGPL - > SSPL, with stronger and stonger copyleft protections. From distribution, to modified usage over a network, to unmodified usage, offering “as service”.
If AWS wants to use my code for another yacht for bezos, they can either pay me or open the source for their code, just the same as I did. Contribute, fork the project or gtfo. And there are many forks of every SSPL project, so no problem there.
Every SSPL product I know is dual licensed, you can use either SSPL or some kind of enterprise license that allows you to do whatever you want, as long as you pay the required fees. Once you go enterprise the SSPL does not apply to you. See alibaba for instance, offering both elastic and mongodb as a service with no issue and no code made available.