Fedora Decides To Not Allow SSPLv1 Licensed Software Into Its Repositories

[Sonadow]

I thought the SSPL is actually quite fair.

Want to use SSPL applications and code without paying? Open up the services that leverage it.
Don't want to? Pay and fund its development, and keep your stuff closed as you desire.

[jo-erlend]

Funny thing is, first I thought negative about it when I read the title but then it became clear that its a license to force something to be open and continue to be open.

My translation of "aggressively discriminatory towards a specific class of users" is just that they do not want to allow filthy rich coops to take their work profit massively from it (without contributing back, even thought some probably would). But I guess that is their (Fedoras) definition of "Free" and "Open" that they should actually all be allowed to take something and then close it down to themselves only, build on top of it but never share anything.

I haven't studied the license, but let's just stipulate for the sake of argument, that Fedora is right to say the license is discriminatory.

Isn't that exactly the point and all there is to it? The moment a license is discriminatory, then it is obviously not Free Software and definitely not Open Source, which specifically and expressly forbids discrimination. It doesn't matter _who_ you're discriminating against. It has nothing to do with being rich or poor, Jew, atheist, homosexual or The Real Donald J. Trump. If it's discriminatory, then it _is not_ Free Software and it _is not_ Open Source. That's very simple. As it ought to be. If a license is 99% compatible with Free Software and Open Source, then it is a proprietary software license, because otherwise, the terms doesn't mean anything at all, to anyone.

If there's one thing we don't need, it's for someone to have a valid excuse for portraying our Freedoms and Openness as some kind of kafkaesque maze where you think you are free and have rights, but then there are these secret 1% rules that enables people to suddenly sue you for a million dollars. No. You have Four Freedoms and they are very simple. The license itself can be more complicated, but it MUST provide those four freedoms, or else it is not Free Software and it is not Open Source.

«None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free.» – Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

[jo-erlend]

I thought the SSPL is actually quite fair.

Want to use SSPL applications and code without paying? Open up the services that leverage it.
Don't want to? Pay and fund its development, and keep your stuff closed as you desire.

It has nothing to do with being fair. The question is whether or not the license is compatible with the definitions of Free Software and Open Source. It might be an extremely good license as proprietary software licenses go, but it's still proprietary, because it's discriminatory.

I haven't studied the license in question, so I just trust Fedora on this.

[timrichardson]

but why? after reading the license it just seems like a more specific, aggressive agpl, there is nothing bad about it IMO

The agpl requires you to distribute your modifications; if you don't make any modifications, no need to distribute. It's a copyleft licence, but it includes entities who offer the runtime as a remotely-accessed service. In this case, if modifications are made, the older GPL licences don't impose any requirement to share modifications, because the service provider doesn't distribute source code. AGPL fixes that. Apart from that, there is no new restriction on what you do with the software or how you charge for access, and the conditions of the licence apply the same to everyone.

This new SSPL is completely different. Merely because of the way you use the software, you become the target of a requirement to open source much more than just the the Mongo code: "“including, without limitation, management software, user interfaces, application program interfaces, automation software, monitoring software, backup software, storage software and hosting software, all such that a user could run an instance of the service using the Service Source Code you make available.”"

This is a bit insane. The GPL has boundaries about how you can mix GPL code with non-GPL code ... discussions about libraries ... and it works pretty well. So despite the "viral" nature of the GPL, it's ok to distribute software made with libraries under different licences; the virality has limits which are not actually so onerous.

This SPPL licence is from another galaxy: it requires that you distribute the source to your backup software! Amazing they didn't specify the source code which runs the security locks on the data centre doors.
And not for ideological reasons. Clearly it is designed to be unacceptable to large service providers such *mazo*

[dkasak]

This is unfortunate. I like what they're aiming for with the SSPL. It's absolutely the case that there are some astonishingly profitable companies out there who offer their own 'enhanced' versions of open-source software, but contribute nothing back, hiding behind the fact that they're technically not distributing binaries. This of course depends on your definition of 'distribution' - in my mind, they *are* distributing binaries.

No-one would claim that Amazon are behaving in the *spirit* of the open-source licensing governing their use of MySQL and Postgres, with their "Aurora" RDS offerings - we know we've been played. None of the other companies that have MySQL and Postgres offerings would defend Amazon - and are in fact on the record being highly critical of Amazon.

As for the license being discriminatory and/or not compatible with the definition of "Free Software" ... oh, BOO HOO!. If this is the leading argument against SSPL, then I think this particular definition of "Free Software" is no longer as good for the open-source community as we'd originally thought. Some parasitic companies have adapted and are extracting their pound of flesh. What do you do when you find a parasite, sucking on your blood? I say, swat it. Arguing over the finer points of freedom in this context doesn't gain you anything other than some self-congratulation. The parasite is still there. The community is still being played.

Others have pointed out the ease with which Fedora users will still be able to install MongoDB. So what's the point? Is this really a net gain for anyone?

[Cape]

WTF I want to install MongoDB now!

Seriously, I think it's a good decision from Mongo! It might hit some minor rigths for some specific users, but it does so because those same users were taking advantage of the freedom they had without contributing. And being fucked over is the worst thing that can happen to free software (see the GPLv2 with TiVo).

I also understand fedora, but hey... Fuzion

[p91paul]

No other open source license impose such burden just for *using* the software....it basically means that if you install MongoDB you need to get a lawyer as soon as someone starts to interact with it, because you need to understand if the rest of your software stack needs to be released under that license. The impossibility of bundling a lawyer with the package means the removal is the only other option. Debian is not shipping mongo with buster as well (https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugr...cgi?bug=916107).

[timrichardson]

As for the license being discriminatory and/or not compatible with the definition of "Free Software" ... oh, BOO HOO!.

There is no way that this licence is a free software licence. It requires you to open source software which has no interaction with MongoDB at all. There is obviously no expectation that Amazon would comply with this ... is Amazon even using open source software for its server monitoring software, its backups, and so on? It has backfired spectacularly, of course (Amazon has reverse engineered Mongo but at an older API). They got a certain reputation and market position on the basis of open source, and now they want to make money out of it, they have abandoned open source.

Yes, MongoDB has a business model problem: they thought they could sell management services for on-premise deployments, but on-premise deployments are fading away. Amazon is solving the problem that Mongo wanted to charge money to solve, and Amazon solves it better for less. That's innovation.

I don't know what Mongo's future business model is. Clearly, it won't be getting licence fees from Amazon. That's the problem of the investors. Don't confuse it with a problem of open source software.

Open source does not require the investors of Mongo to make money; open source works because of open source licences and all kinds of people deciding to collectively make small contributions to existing work for mutual benefit. We know this works: Mongo did not invent open source software and open source software will survive what ever happens to Mongo-the-company. They are no longer an open source company, they are a business trying to extract licence revenue.

[ssokolow]

I heard about this back when LWN.net published an article with the misleading (some might even argue propagandistic) title "Making the GPL more scary" back in October.

That article shows excerpts from the license and the big problem is that the SSPL basically boils down to "If you don't have the rights to relicense your entire software stack under the SSPL, you cannot use MongoDB without paying us for an alternative license".

The relevant bit is paragraph 2 of "13. Offering the Program as a Service" (emphasis mine):

“Service Source Code” means the Corresponding Source for the Program or the modified version, and the Corresponding Source for all programs that you use to make the Program or modified version available as a service, including, without limitation, management software, user interfaces, application program interfaces, automation software, monitoring software, backup software, storage software and hosting software, all such that a user could run an instance of the service using the Service Source Code you make available.

(That "including, without limitation" means "Including, but not limited to", if you were unsure.)

It's very much not in line with the spirit of the AGPL, the GPL, or the definitions of Free or Open-Source licensing in general, which follow the definition of a "derived work" set down in copyright law and intentionally limits restrictions on aggregated works to build scripts, which is included as an extension to the requirement that the source released must be in the "preferred form of the work for making modifications to it".

As for the definitions for various license classifications:

The Open Source Definition explicitly says "9. License Must Not Restrict Other Software".

Under the FSF's Four Freedoms, this falls under "Freedom 0: The freedom to run the program for any purpose."

The Debian Free Software Guidelines, which are basically Debian's equivalent to this Fedora policy also contain "9. License must not restrict other software." and are paired with a test specifically to guard against this kind of relicensing called "The Tentacles of Evil test", which requires that relicensing may not retroactively strip rights from people who have already received copies under a copyleft license.

Imagine that the author is hired by a large evil corporation and, now in their thrall, attempts to do the worst to the users of the program: to make their lives miserable, to make them stop using the program, to expose them to legal liability, to make the program non-free, to discover their secrets, etc. The same can happen to a corporation bought out by a larger corporation bent on destroying free software in order to maintain its monopoly and extend its evil empire. To be free, the license cannot allow even the author to take away the required freedoms.

[ssokolow]

As for the license being discriminatory and/or not compatible with the definition of "Free Software" ... oh, BOO HOO!. If this is the leading argument against SSPL, then I think this particular definition of "Free Software" is no longer as good for the open-source community as we'd originally thought. Some parasitic companies have adapted and are extracting their pound of flesh. What do you do when you find a parasite, sucking on your blood? I say, swat it. Arguing over the finer points of freedom in this context doesn't gain you anything other than some self-congratulation. The parasite is still there. The community is still being played.

So you think anyone should be able to just slap a Windows Logo certification sticker on any random piece of garbage hardware without getting it to pass Microsoft's test suite first?

It's the same kind of thing. If a license is a "Free Software license" in capitals, it generally means someone got lazy about saying FSF-approved. If a license is an "Open Source license" in capitals, it generally means someone is getting lazy and meant to say OSI-certified.

Even with "free software" and "open source" without the Significant Capitalization, a lot of people would call the SSPL a "shared source" license (from Microsoft's Shared Source Initiative) since, in practice, it lets you read the source, but imposes restrictions that impede your ability to actually use it.