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Comment by ballenf | Hacker News Reader

Does MongoDB also release their stack or are they exempt from the disclosure requirement?

Apologies if this has been asked a million times -- didn't see it in a skim of your linked discussions nor the FAQ.

At this point they are exempt which speaks to the double standard. MongoDB makes copious use of open source components. E.g. They use PostGres for their reporting solution and make money off it. What do they contribute back to the PostGres community for this?

No apologies required! If we see this question come up a lot we can add it to the FAQ.

MongoDB does not release the stack for Atlas, our SaaS. That's possible because we own the copyright to the source code -- we don't have to issue the software to ourselves.

The blog post we published announcing the change covers this, as well as our motivations and expectations in a lot of detail:

https://www.mongodb.com/blog/post/mongodb-now-released-under...

that's sketchy and means you are violating your own license.

and since there is no dual licensing or anything that says that the mongodb inc does not do what the license says...

They aren't violating anything. They own the copyright. The license exists for everyone else that isn't MongoDB Inc. They can do as they please and this isn't sketchy or in violation of everything. Open source software still has copyright and the owner of the copyright has no limitations to what they can do with the software they own. Open source software comes with a license which limits what everyone else can do with the software.

That takes some level of hypocrisy - you are not making your Atlas as opensource, but you require others to do so. This clearly indicates that you are using an opensource license as an extortion schema against competitors.

It absolutely does not make them hypocritical. They own the copyright and can do as they choose. They simply don't want other companies getting rich on their back by simply offering a MongoDB SaaS. Why is it OK for AWS to just take a project and start making millions off of it while the people who invested in the project get nothing? AWS and similar cloud companies are simply trying to strip mine all the value from some popular open source projects and contribute nothing back. Most of these cloud companies show zero interest in partnering with the copyright owners so now we're seeing copyright owners take a stand against this exploitation.

There's a big difference between a piece of free software being vital to your codebase and you simply selling that free software as-a-service.

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