Whoa, very biased article (especially for LWN). Only cites media coverage; no links supporting that Amazon, MSFT, Google, etc. were in fact EEE’ing (or at best, behaving unethically) with each of these projects.

It even suggests cloud providers did contribute, and uses bad data (git commits “by employer” w/o dataset) that basically contradicts their argument.

I may be biased, as I saw Amazon doing exactly what this article claims “maybe they weren’t”. But statements like this seem intentionally misleading, and easily disproven:

“Distributing a source-available version of MongoDB could be seen as a loss-leader strategy to reach developers that the company wagered did not care about open-source.”

MongoDB is still “source-available”, and on the same GitHub repo I’ve used since 2010. The SSPL only impacts cloud-providers, and has exceptions for cloud providers who release their source code.

The OSI doesn’t get to define open-source. Neither do I, but at least I was part of the community for ~20 years…