That’s how they’re trying to sell it. But why did Elastic and Redis drop SSPL if it was so good, and why did OSI not accept it as open source?
The answers are here but the TLDR is that SSPL is vague and, as a consequence, makes it risky to provide a service with the product, unless you are large enough to make a big lucrative deal with the owner of the product.
This stifles competition and innovation.
Case in point: Mongo DBAs are nearly non-existent outside California and managed MongoDB is much more expensive than managed PostgreSQL/MariaDB services, because it is only offered by 3 providers.
Limiting the number of provider is exactly the point. You either pay the developers or make your code available.
I don’t know about Elastic, but redis was accepting contributions so changing the license was very controversial, if not legally questionable. AFAIK mongodb, like sqlite, don’t accept contributions.
Big lucrative deal? Just buy a license, like tens of thousands of others do, millions if we include other “code available” products that also offer licenses: red hat, Ubuntu, temporal, different Kafka versions, Postgres, MySQL, etc.
I think you are confusing a license to use “enterprise edition” yourself, with a “license to provide the product (as a service) to customers”, as is required under SSPL.
SSPL is not AGPL: you can never be sure you comply with “or make your code available” due to the way this is worded. Please read https://www.ssplisbad.com/ before arguing that it is the same as AGPL.
That’s how they’re trying to sell it. But why did Elastic and Redis drop SSPL if it was so good, and why did OSI not accept it as open source? The answers are here but the TLDR is that SSPL is vague and, as a consequence, makes it risky to provide a service with the product, unless you are large enough to make a big lucrative deal with the owner of the product.
This stifles competition and innovation.
Case in point: Mongo DBAs are nearly non-existent outside California and managed MongoDB is much more expensive than managed PostgreSQL/MariaDB services, because it is only offered by 3 providers.
https://www.ssplisbad.com/
Limiting the number of provider is exactly the point. You either pay the developers or make your code available.
I don’t know about Elastic, but redis was accepting contributions so changing the license was very controversial, if not legally questionable. AFAIK mongodb, like sqlite, don’t accept contributions.
Big lucrative deal? Just buy a license, like tens of thousands of others do, millions if we include other “code available” products that also offer licenses: red hat, Ubuntu, temporal, different Kafka versions, Postgres, MySQL, etc.
I think you are confusing a license to use “enterprise edition” yourself, with a “license to provide the product (as a service) to customers”, as is required under SSPL.
SSPL is not AGPL: you can never be sure you comply with “or make your code available” due to the way this is worded. Please read https://www.ssplisbad.com/ before arguing that it is the same as AGPL.