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Comment by SergeAx | Hacker News Reader

The idea of free software is that user can (and have the right to) modify it in any way one wants. If I found a bug in free software, I can fix it by myself or wait for someone else to fix it, or pay someone to make a fix. That's the way it works.

(edit: typo)

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You can do all that with Mongo's new license.

It's an AGPL + AWS-is-killing-our-support/monitoring/ops-business license.

It's likely that the outrage is from people who don't use MongoDB. A lot of my things rely on the Community Edition. Even with the SSPL, I'm still eagerly waiting a few more weeks to upgrade to 4.2, and take advantage of some of what's new.

If I found a bug, and was adventurous to fix it, I can still open a JIRA and submit a PR to the project ...

How do you know?

The license is no longer OSI approved, so how do you know what you're allowed or not allowed to do?

How do you know that what's keeping AWS from using it isn't also creating a problem from you?

Have you consulted with a lawyer?

That's one benefit of using actual Open Source. You have a definition that all licenses have to comply with, such that developers know exactly the set of freedoms that's common between all of them.

Once you step out of that definition, you're on your own. So you know, I wouldn't take legal advice from random people on HN, you might run into problems.

You're outsourcing your thinking to an organisation that's looking at specific definitions. Might be better to read the licensee and compare it with the previous one.

But what's the difference between open source, free, and "source available" for inspection?

This is easily searchable.

I'm not asking for lack of knowledge, but I was asking the parent as they needed to make the distinction.

Why? The FSF and the OSD make the distinction.

Open source: source is freely available online.

Free software: free for modification, expansion or forking. Possibly free for profit (BSD license)

Source Available: Source is available but under restrictions. Locked room source viewing under NDA to confirm there aren't vulnerabilities for example.

Open source/free software: You can download, modify and re-release the source.

Source-available: You can view the source, perhaps freely, but can't modify or release your modifications.

I can really recommend you to look at Free Software Foundation website[1]. In a nutshell: free software is like "free will", not "free lunch". It gives users four essential freedoms: to run it any way one wants, to study and modify source code, to redistribute copies and particulary redistribute modified copies[2].

As you can see, "open source" give s only half of those freedoms: to study code, it is not mandadory that you actually can modify it.

So, not all opens source software is free. Check out licence comparison and approvals page at Wikipedia.[3]

[1] https://www.fsf.org/ [2] https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.en.html [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_free_and_open-so...

You're wrong and as a matter of fact the definition for Open Source is more clear and a little more restrictive than that of Free Software:

https://opensource.org/osd

Thank you for the link. I was actually unaware of this organization. I was thinking that "open source" is more like a figure of speech, not ideology like "Free Software"

At the same time, we see a MongoDB example: a software, which definitely is open source, but also definitely is non-free.

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