How Do We Feel About SSPL?

[gotwf]

How do we feel about the Server Side Public License, a.k.a. SSPL? Introduced by MongoDB, submitted to, and then pulled/withdrawn from OSI certification when it was clear the license would not be approved. Minor uproar. Some otherwise quite reasonably sane distributions, e.g. Voidlinux stopped packaging Mongo. Yeah, we can still run it but now we need to compile it first. In this day and age of one click docker deployments, I doubt many are too keen on this…

Nevertheless, and in spite of its lukewarm reception by the foss/ross community Elastic Search has now also adopted the evil SSPL.

Do we care? And if so, what steps are you taking to mitigate?

Inquiring minds are curious…

[phenomlab]

@gotwf here’s an interesting take
https://blog.tidelift.com/what-i-learned-from-the-server-side-public-license

[gotwf]

@phenomlab While I may emphasize with the issues the SSPL is purportedly endeavoring to solve… I distrust this shill’s spin doctorin’. As do most.

I posted up to inquire how “we” the collective at sudonix view the chicanery. Hmmm…

At the very least provide springboard for a friendly lil’ local license religious war, eh?

Personal feelings aside, my take is that the SSPL will be accepted. Eventually. Begrudgingly. Emphasis on that last bit.

[phenomlab]

@gotwf I only posted that to add colour to the topic. It’s a bit one-sided otherwise as your original post is against.

[gotwf]

@phenomlab Naw, my op was neutral presentation of selected bits of sspl drama. My follow up post, otoh, does reveal some colour.

The devil is indeed in the details. And the details warrant discussion. Or… not??

Quite relevant, indeed, I would think to the NodeBB crowd, as mongodb is presetnly very much the preferred, trusted and true, nodebb db backend. Although… I will be testing the PostgreSQL stuff again here shortly. In no small part because of a distrust of the folks at mongo. Ditto now Elastic. Although we pretty much always distrusted them. Crippled Open Source. Go figure.

PostgreSQL has been around for a long time. Licensed all that while under the favorable BSD license. What is not to like? Well, in some use cases/work loads, nosql is not just a latest and greatest hipster marketing thang…

So we shall soon see what we shall see on that one.

[phenomlab]

@gotwf said in How Do We Feel About SSPL?:

And the details warrant discussion. Or… not??

Yes, but the idea is for discussion to be balanced rather than one-sided.