At least that's my understanding. Am I missing something here? It's fairly reasonable for a company to licence their docs with a non-commercial licence like this.
Lawyer repellent (I hope): The quote comes from https://github.com/mongodb/docs/commit/50e48200cde7e2eaffdc6... , and anyone who receives this comment may copy it as they like.
Because it's already in source form and isn't "compiled in" into a derived form I don't think it has the same potency from an infectious license perspective as GPL does. If you bundle this document as part of your commercial database I think they can't do diddly squat as long as you make clear that the document itself is still under the CC sharealike license.
I'm pretty sure the authors really want to prevent competing implementations that make money for someone else, and the wording expresses their intent. I believe that copyright on the document won't let them stop a company that can afford decent lawyers from implementing the spec, but it certainly doesn't make me any more likely to touch anything related.
> You may not use or adapt this material for any commercial purpose, such as to create a commercial database or database-as-a-service offering.
It'll be exciting to see Oracle vs Google turn into Mongo vs AWS, which is clearly where this is eventually going.
edit: I mean, it’s not that I strongly care, but why not explain if you disagree? How exactly is a specification not a form of documentation?
The relevant definition for spec would probably be:
> a detailed description of the design and materials used to make something.
That sounds an awful lot like documentation.
Maybe you are implying that you can’t read it and then make your own implementation of that reading, but that’s not true. IANAL, but I’d be willing to bet my lawful ass it means you can’t reproduce the document for your own commercial implementation. Not that you can’t reference it. I don’t think “derivative” is that strong.
Even if you subscribe to the belief that the protobufs are eligible for protection under copyright law, which is fair since it seems to be the current understanding even if it is relatively new, I still don’t understand how creating compatible specs without reversing is illicit. It’s fair use, no? I thought interoperability was a valid claim for fair use.