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In 2019, multiple open source companies changed course
Free and open source software enables the world as we know it in 2019. From Web servers to kiosks to the big data algorithms mining your Facebook feed, nearly every computer system you interact with runs, at least in part, on free software. And in the larger tech industry, free software has given rise to a galaxy of startups and enabled the largest software acquisition in the history of the world.
Free software is a gift, a gift that made the world as we know it possible. And from the start, it seemed like an astounding gift to give. So astounding in fact that it initially made businesses unaccustomed to this kind of generosity uncomfortable. These companies weren't unwilling to use free software, it was simply too radical and by extension too political. It had to be renamed: "open source."
Once that happened, open source software took over the world.
Recently, though, there's been a disturbance in the open source force. Within the last year, companies like Redis Labs, MongoDB, and Confluent all changed their software licenses, moving away from open source licenses to more restrictive terms that limit what can be done with the software, making it no longer open source software.
The problem, argue Redis Labs, MongoDB and others, is a more modern tech trend: hosted software services. Also known as, "the cloud." Also known as Amazon AWS.
Amazon, for its part, came out swinging, releasing its own version of the code behind Elastic Search this spring in response to licensing changes at Elastic (the company behind Elastic Search). And besides a new trademark dispute over Amazon's naming convention, Elastic has a very different response from that of MongoDB and Redis—it hasn't said a word in protest.
MongoDB the company is built around the open source "NoSQL" database of the same name. MongoDB's database is useful for storing unstructured data, for example images, which it can handle just as well as it handles more traditional data types. Data is stored in JSON-like documents rather than the columns and rows of a relational database. Since there's no structured tables there's no "structured query language" for working with the data, hence the term "NoSQL."
MongoDB is not the only NoSQL database out there, but it's one of the most widely used. According to industry aggregator, DB Engines, MongoDB is the fifth most popular database, with everyone from Google to Code Academy to Foursquare using MongoDB.
MongoDB is also leading the charge to create a new kind of open source license, which CTO Eliot Horowitz believes is necessary to protect open source software businesses as computing moves into the new world of the cloud.
The cloud, argue Horowitz and others, requires the open source community to re-think and possibly update open source licenses to "deal with new challenges in a new environment." The challenges are, essentially, AWS, Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure, which are all capable of taking open source software, wrapping it up as a service, and reselling it. The problem with AWS or Azure wrapping up MongoDB and offering it as part of a software as a service (SaaS) is that it then competes with MongoDB's own cloud-based SaaS—MongoDB Atlas. What's threatened then is not MongoDB's source code, but MongoDB's own SaaS derived from that source code, and that happens to be the company's chief source of revenue.
To combat the potential threat to its bottom line, MongoDB has moved from the Gnu Public License (GPL) to what it calls the Server Side Public License, or SSPL. The SSPL says, in essence, you can do anything you want with this software, except use it to build something that competes with MongoDB Atlas.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 17 2019, @02:08PM (4 children)
Wholesale making GPLed stuff closed source, or some kind free-for-toy-use restrictive license, will be much easier with FSF comprehensively defanged.
Whatever drones remaining are likely too busy quaking in their boots at prospect of unpersoning, to raise their voices against anything the nice corporations choose to want.
(Score: 2) by barbara hudson on Thursday October 17 2019, @10:04PM (3 children)
I don't know what the social safety net is like in Massachusetts, but his 401k can't be too healthy. Probably eligible for welfare and food stamps.
We're programmers - we're supposed to be able to foresee well-known issues like "gotta make a living." If you're willing to write software and depend on donations (donor ware), or beerware, or chocolateware, at some point you're going to have to deal with the need for a real job.
With all those who are concerned about privacy, there's probably a growing market for proprietary software that runs entirely locally. Sort of like the win31 days when you could buy a program that took dictation and saved it as text in your editor of choice, and you could operate your computer by voice commands, and turn light and the tv on and off via computer (that last predates Windows).
SoylentNews is social media. Says so right in the slogan. Soylentnews is people, not tech.
(Score: -1, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 17 2019, @11:46PM
Which as I observed is your normal.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday October 18 2019, @04:08AM
Sounds like he's not relevant to the discussion then. It's not just that he's "failed" to make money, but he hasn't even tried.
(Score: 1) by ThatIrritatingGuy on Friday October 18 2019, @11:56AM
Stallman did nothing wrong and anyone telling you otherwise is lying. You can read details here [github.io].
Someone deciding to not make money is not relevant to the discussion on how to make money.