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Comment by jacooper | Hacker News Reader

If its open, they are selling managed hosting, its the main reason the AGPL exists, you must publish the modifications, even for network usage.

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This is not a barrier. Amazon is perfectly able to publish their changes if any. Because the moat is that its hosted inside AWS at a button click. They can also host it for cheaper as they don't have to pay anything to develop the product.

Then why did Mongo relicense? I assumed that AGPL was not enough to maintain their business which is why they are now using a more extreme form of AGPL that is no longer considered Free.

You can fully, legally use AGPL software as Amazon was doing as long as you follow the licensing terms.

Which doesn’t help the FOSS developers extract money out of the cloud users because they can just use the free (for whatever value of ‘free’ Amazon provides) bundled version without any support contacts or whatever.

If your entire business model is based on giving away the software you can see how this might be a problem, no?

Are you disagreeing with me or just giving more detail? Because I think that's what I was saying. My opinion is that this is not fair to a company like MongoDB.

For clarification: MongoDB is still Free as in beer, but not free as in Libre. IOW, Anyone can use MongoDB without paying money, but they cannot offer it to others as-a-service without providing the entire stack of hosting software back to the community. And of course AWS won't do that. So therefore the license is not 'free' to AWS, Azure, GCP, etc.

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