> 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.