I'm under the impression that everything in the paragraph above is objective and not subjective. I do not claim it is definitely greed, but since MongoDB did a completely arbitrary move to make license favoring them, it's valid to ask this question. My subjective opinion is that MongoDB committed suicide and they'll be forgotten in a few years time.
I respect your opinion about whether the SSPL is free or open, but it is not one that is uniformly shared by the OSI, as evidenced by the discussion currently underway in the license-approval mailing list. Many have argued in its favor. On that basis, some of your assertions in paragraph one are subjective.
Not that there’s anything wrong with subjectivity! I think it is valid to ask the question of whether the move was motivated by greed... it’s even understandable why people would default to that conclusion. (I wish that weren’t the case, but I’m not naive.)
Since you’re asking, I will give you my answer: the SSPL was created to make it viable for open source projects that are largely or completely funded by a single entity to remain funded in an era of large cloud vendors. While it is about revenue, it is not about greed.
The proof of the pudding is in the tasting, and I won’t ask you to just buy my claim. Just keep your eyes open for a conspicuous absence of MongoDB strong-arming community MongoDB users into buying commercial licenses.
As far as including MongoDB in Debian et al, goes, we absolutely respect process and principles. We’re waiting to see what the feedback from the OSI is.
That said, you did not work with OSI or the FSF before changing the license. And your company is not the only contributor to MongoDB, you have third party contributors as well, who did not have a say in it, because of the copyright attribution that you require.
In other words, you did not collaborate with OSI or the FSF and you screwed your contributors.
It's good that you're now waiting on feedback from OSI, but the damage to the FOSS ecosystem was already done.
You certainly have a point about our not working with the OSI prior to issuing the SSPL. All other things being equal, we would like to have, but as a publicly traded company it's just not responsible to announce "we will be changing our license... to... something... we'll get back to you on what that'll be... sometime."
We weren't happy about it, but we're doing the best we can given the constraints. We're all grownups, and accept that one of the consequences is that some in the OSS community feel betrayed by that change, but we ask that you let our actions going forward, not the worst suspicions of those most predisposed to judge us harshly, determine what you think of our dedication to OSS and our community.
As for non-employee contributors to the MongoDB codebase (who account for about 3% of the codebase), I think we should credit them with the same adult responsibility for their actions as we hold MongoDB to. Their contributions were made in full knowledge of the attribution requirement, and we have no reason to believe -- and no evidence -- that they resent anything MongoDB as a company has done.
I'd say I'm surprised that some people are attacking your license, which overall forces providers to increase user freedom, but I remember the 90s and 00s when the GPL/AGPL was being attacked as a non-free (as in freedom) license - "How can it respect freedom when it FORCES me to release my source code?"
The same people today go on about how great the CC licenses are when they have the NC-SA, which I've been using for my artistic projects since it came out.
Do you have a Stallman like wall of text about defending users freedoms? Because there are enough people who would read it and understand what you're doing once they get past the FUD of "It's proprietary!!!".
And less so when it impinges on the ability to make profit from it (leaving aside the argument about "no-one says you can't make money from open source software" - of course you can, but the business model is a little less... convenient... so they fault the license, not anything else).
I would not make the choice to build a startup on MongoDB today given the expansion of the license's virality. Even if my business model wasn't in the SSPL's immediate crosshairs, the direction the license is moving gives me no confidence that MongoDB won't make my life harder down the road. It's just not worth the eventual headache. Lawyers make things hard enough, I'm not going to take on any more legal exposure than I absolutely need to in order to ship my product.
For example: prior to this change, people could develop an extension to MongoDB which combined MongoDB with some GPLv3 software, and they could then freely redistribute that combined work.
Now they cannot.
MongoDB may as well be Oracle as far as most developers will care now (that isn't a compliment).
Couldn't you get in contact with the EFF and work on a more general, more viral form of AGPL, and treat the current license as more of a stop-gap measure? With those viral licenses it is really important to have only a few, so that they are compatible.
The wording is so vague that this license is incredibly toxic, no one in their right mind would consider using it.
Seriously, is that all you IP lawyers can come up with ?