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Comment by daniel_levine | Hacker News Reader

How many core developers work somewhere besides 10gen? I know there are a few contributors who work on drivers but it seems like nearly all of the contributors work at 10gen.

Lately I've noticed a lot of "open source" projects that don't feel open source at all. Chrome, Android and Mongo all jump to mind. In each case one company does nearly all of the work and dictates what the product does and where it goes.

It is true that I can fork as I wish, but the odds of my indie fork being able to keep up or compete long enough to gain escape velocity seem unbelievably low. It seems that whatever 10gen or Google want to do on these projects they can do with little chance of reprisal from any open source community.

Perhaps there should be a new name for software whose source is available but is effectively controlled by a for-profit entity.

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It's a big deal that a for-profit company is willing to let all their customers and competitors see their source code and reuse it (in accordance with their license).

If we need a new word for this type of behavior to distinguish it from FOSS, then I hope it's a word with strong positive connotations, because it's a great thing for for-profit companies to be doing, especially when most for-profit technologies companies today are standing on the shoulders of open source giants of the past.

Not if the goal is simply to create a competitive moat and dependent population before gouging them. I'm not saying Mongo will do that but I will be curious about how they interact with companies like MongoHQ and MongoLabs over time.(And hi Andrew!)

While a bit extreme I might compare it to the agricultural aid practices of Western governments. In many cases they are fantastic, but often they also serve as a way to destroy blossoming agricultural economies. Without working domestic agriculture country development is often stunted (in the case of Mongo, work on a truly open source alternative).

Separate digressions:

I would also argue that much more of modern software is actually built on progress made by proprietary technology than people give credit, but that's a separate debate. I fully recognize the value of open source and it is my preference

An interesting counterpoint to my agriculture argument would be free trade across borders debates. Much like the US can feed the world for nothing, manufacturing was done more effectively in one place (China for awhile) but I wouldn't argue for restrictions on how China behaved to get us dependent on them (though currency manipulation and workers rights might come up).

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