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Comment by vmbrasseur | Hacker News Reader

The OSI encourages and supports all people and organisations to profit from free and open source software.

The ability to do so is enshrined in Item 6 of the Open Source Definition: https://opensource.org/osd-annotated

The Open Source Definition provides a single point of reference for what it means for a project to be "open source."

Licenses are submitted for approval by those who wish to prove that the license provides the benefits and freedoms assured by the Open Source Definition and therefore by open source.

Licenses that do not provide each benefit and freedom in that definition are not not approved and are not—literally by definition—open source.

MongoDB recognises the value that a consistent worldwide definition of open source provides to the entire software development ecosystem and is seeking approval for their license to show their support and respect for the definition.

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Sure, but here you are saying:

1. "Licences that conform to the OSD are open source". Agreed.

2. "Licences that do not conform to the OSD are not open source". Ok, let's run with that for now.

That is not what you said upthread. You said "MongoDB is under a non-approved license and therefore IS NOT OPEN SOURCE". Nope. Even for those who accept the OSD as the sole definition of open source, you haven't yet established whether MongoDB's new licence is 1 or 2. You cannot categorically (capitally!) say "IS NOT OPEN SOURCE" until you establish that.

Using basic context clues and inference, it's obvious she meant "IS NOT OPEN SOURCE [currently]". The license has not been approved as open source. It may be eventually, but it is not at present.

No. She's conflating "an OSI-approved licence" with "open source". The Open Source Definition does not contain a requirement that a licence must be OSI-approved.

And who is the trusted organization that makes the determination whether a license adheres to OSD? Unless you want to hire your own lawyer and make the determination yourself, the world must wait on OSI's review of the license. Until further proof is put forth, I also would not consider the new license to be open source. That is, it is not yet safe to say that this license is open source. This holds true for me, because OSI guidelines are organizationally justifiable and makes my life easier when dealing with auditors.

Rather than pontificating about terms and hilariously claiming unenforcable rights to commonly-used words, the OSI should look at the reason Redis, Mongo, and soon others seek to update their license terms. It's because development is simply not sustainable in times of cloud providers. Who does the OSI represent? Is their intent that nobody except cloud providers can earn a living, by commoditizing software?

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