In my opinion I feel like the real issue is that many in the open source community want to have their cake and eat it to. They want to put ideas out there ostensibly for free and be part of the social communal movement, but when those ideas are actually used to generate value - they want to see the checks roll in. That's just not how it works. Look at products that are funded by donations. There are some exceptions, but the general rule is that they end up grossly underfunded and have to be more and more aggressive with requests for donations just to stay afloat. If people want payment, then demand payment. If you want to give away something for free, don't ever expect to get paid for it.
> a license where something is free for noncommercial or limited commercial usage, and premium otherwise.
That's basically what Mongo have switched to. Unfortunately, this broke other bits of community, because playing with licenses is actually not that easy.
My point is that, maybe, we need a new license that can reflect the changed times. GPL 3 wanted to be that license, but it doesn't look like it succeeded. The new licenses attempted piecemeal by this or that company (like Mongo) will always fail to cut it, because the are typically not written by people with significant experience and knowledge in this particular field (license-writing).
Maybe it's time for interested companies and expert stakeholders (FSF etc) to come together and try to agree on something that could move us all forward.
>Proprietary software is another name for nonfree software. In the past we subdivided nonfree software into “semifree software”, which could be modified and redistributed noncommercially, and “proprietary software”, which could not be. But we have dropped that distinction and now use “proprietary software” as synonymous with nonfree software.
>The Free Software Foundation follows the rule that we cannot install any proprietary program on our computers except temporarily for the specific purpose of writing a free replacement for that very program. Aside from that, we feel there is no possible excuse for installing a proprietary program.
Expecting the FSF and RMS in particular to negotiate away the core freedoms (just so that businesses can make profits, no less!) strikes me as the height of futility.
Who is "we" here?
Certainly not the FSF.
Why does OSI approve licenses that clearly don't care about this (e.g. GPL)?
Seriously?
There is the law, and there is the spirit of the law. When the law fails to produce the outcomes it was designed for, there is a problem.
It makes a lot of sense, especially for smaller companies. But Amazon in this case doesn't use MongoDB for something they need, they just want to make it available to their customers. They have no opinion on what their customers need from MongoDB, so they're happy to just tag along for free.
