Nobody wants the SSPL (not even MongoDB), but Amazon is forcing companies to do this while contributing nothing. These projects are still open source, and actually contribute to the libraries they depend upon. As a former developer of MongoDB who watched this happen, I’ve contributed to a variety of open source projects. MongoDB also couldn’t just lay everybody off and let Amazon grow their monopolies (much like Oracle’s behavior). But please don’t suggest I’m any less a part of the open source community than I was 20 years ago.
If you don’t believe the SSPL is open source, then you definitely don’t believe the GPL (and related licenses) are open source.
The definition of open source Amazon points everybody to is not the same as what’s defined by the FSF and other organizations. Nobody gets to own the term “open source” — that simply means the source code is available for you to modify, build learn from, etc. The details Amazon mentions only come into play when trying to make money off of an open source project.
The SSPL is not open source because it does not meet the definition of "open source" per the Open Source Initiative (https://opensource.org/). See https://opensource.org/osd for the definition in question.
And it _also_ doesn't meet the definition of "free software" per the FSF.
If no one gets to own the term "open source" and anyone can define it however they like, then the term is meaningless.
With all due respect, dictionaries can certainly define the term. They create definitions based on examples of the word's use, and Oxford English defines it as: "Denoting software for which the original source code is made freely available and may be redistributed and modified."
We can agree to disagree about the details; no use arguing on the internet, and I respect your view. But please keep in mind the OSI's mission is fitting open source into a legal framework. It's not the ASF, FSF, Mozilla Foundation or other organizations who actually support and organize open source projects. Full disclosure; I also worked on Apache Drill, thanks to the ASF.
My primary point is that Amazon is not part of the open source community (AFAIK, they've never claimed to be). So it's hard for me to trust a company overtly focused on monetizing OSS without contributing. IMHO, all of the engineers at Elastic who gave so much time and effort for this project are still part of the open source community. I hate to see Amazon effectively judging which projects/people are "truly" part of the community when their motivation is so clearly corrupt.
I hope this comes across with respect, and please know that I'd much rather not see licenses like the SSPL. But after seeing Amazon's monopolistic and anticompetitive behavior play out repeatedly with various companies, I can't just watch them do this without saying something. Even on a stale HN thread. :)
One last thing to note -- Bruce Perens left the OSI in January of 2020 (shortly after the SSPL stuff went down), and said: "We created a tower of babel of licenses. We did not design-in license compliance and we have a tremendous noncompliance problem that isn't getting better. We did not design a good framework for where proprietary software can go, and where it never should. Our license loopholes are exploited." ESR (who I detest as a human being), was banned from the OSI two months later. I don't mean to suggest this was a direct reaction the SSPL though -- please see the OSI's wikipedia page and cited sources.
