Two software companies, fed up with Amazon and other big cloud players, have a controversial new plan to fight back

Dev Ittycheria MongoDB

Two open-source database companies, MongoDB and Redis Labs, grew tired of seeing Amazon take their free software and make gobs of money on it, without much benefit to them.
Amazon has every legal right to use their software in this way, because it is using the "open source" versions of their software, which is free to use.
But many software licenses were developed before the rise of cloud computing, before cloud companies like Amazon, Alibaba, Baidu and Tencent could offer that free software as a service at a profit.
Now MongoDB and Redis Labs have introduced controversial new licensing that adds restrictions for companies or people trying to sell their software. And the move has upset a lot of programmers.

Every year, large cloud companies like Amazon rake in billions of dollars — but some of their most popular cloud services comes from repackaging software projects created by other, smaller companies.

Amazon is repackaging what's known as "open source" software, which is software that is given away for free, meaning Amazon has every legal right to use it in this way. For instance, since 2013, Amazon had been offering the open-source database Redis as part of a popular cloud service called ElastiCache.

Still, some companies, like MongoDB and Redis Labs, are watching Amazon become the major benefactor of their work and feel they are not getting enough benefit in return. And they've come up with a controversial plan to change that.

MongoDB, another open-source database company, felt the same about how foreign tech giants like Alibaba, Tencent and Baidu sell its software as a cloud service. MongoDB has invested $300 million into research and development for its open-source software and if these giants want to make money on the free versions, its CEO feels they should, at the very least, contribute back in some major ways.

While most open source licenses allow anyone to use the software for free, the users typically contribute back to the software project: fixing things, adding features, making the software better for everyone.

"We see that more companies are testing the boundaries of open source," Dev Ittycheria, CEO of MongoDB, told Business Insider. "They’re taking the value of what was built. Rather than litigating this to the core, we believe it makes more sense to focus our resources on building great products for our companies."

Strip mining

Although those major cloud companies technically aren’t breaking any laws, if they are all take and no give, they are breaking the social rules of open source. Companies like MongoDB and Redis can give away big portions of their software because what they get in return is free labor from the software users to make the software better. That helps them improve the commercial versions of their software, the ones they do charge money to use.

There’s a term in the open source community for what the cloud companies are being accused of doing: strip mining. It means that companies are using free software code for their own gain, with no intention of contributing to the project.

“[Amazon has] taken Redis’ open-source project and packaged it as a service and monetized that,” Manish Gupta, CMO of Redis Labs, told Business Insider. “Their contribution to the open source is minuscule, not even in the 1 percent range.”

Jeff Bezos Amazon CEO

Previously, both Redis and MongoDB were licensed under the Affero General Public License (AGPL), a license that says any modifications made to the software must be released to the public.

That means large companies can still make money from and run those open-source projects, but the license just makes it slightly more inconvenient for them to do so. And if those companies don't make any changes and simply sell the software, they're not violating anything. Those companies also aren’t obligated to contribute to the projects beyond the social expectation that they do.

But Ittycheria believes that they could easily contribute.

"They don’t make enhancements that they’ve created available for the community while they’ve created a valuable franchise," Ittycheria said.

Now they're introducing new licensing

So both of these companies are trying to change their licensing to make cloud companies either pay up or roll up their sleeves and contribute to the work.

Two months ago, Redis Labs added a new licensing option for Redis modules. It uses an existing free software license called Apache and adds a term known as the Commons Clause, which forbids users from selling the software.

“People traditionally had a lot of choices in the open source world: give everything away for free. People traditionally had a lot of choices in the proprietary world: give nothing away to the world,” Kevin Wang, founder and CEO of FOSSA, which contributed the Commons Clause, told Business Insider. “Commons Clause is in the middle.”

And on Tuesday, MongoDB introduced a new software license called Server Side Public License (SSPL).

Under SSPL, users can still change and redistribute the software, but it explicitly states that if a person or a company wants to publicly offer MongoDB as a service, they must open source that service -- meaning they must make the code available to everyone for free. Otherwise, they must obtain a commercial license.

In other words, if those major cloud companies want to sell MongoDB as a service, they have to freely share their code for the full components of that service, giving everyone, even their competitors, a look at their technology.

This license will affect all versions of MongoDB’s community server released after Tuesday. Right now, MongoDB is waiting for approval for its new license from an organization that handles open source licenses, the Open Source Initiative.

Eliot Horowitz, CTO and co-founder of MongoDB, believes this license will not affect the vast majority of MongoDB’s users -- only the companies that are trying to sell MongoDB as a service.

“We want to continue investing heavily to build great products for our community,” Horowitz said. “All this time we spend litigating makes it harder to build and create products.”

Eliot Horowitz

Open-source licensing wars

Investors responded favorably to MongoDB announcing its new license. But within the open-source world, it has ignited some tension.

Likewise, when Redis Labs announced it was adding the Commons Clause, this also sparked wars on open-source licensing. This is because that while software that uses this clause may include code that's freely available, it no longer fully meets the definition of "open source." Even the Commons Clause website says, "to avoid confusion, it is best not to call Commons Clause software 'open source.'"

Some viewed the clause as harmful, arguing that if a project is offered as open-source, then it should stay completely open-source – and adding restrictions goes against the very meaning of open-source. Some developers even counterattacked by forking the code, meaning they are taking the free stuff and making their own, independent versions of it, not beholden to the original developer like MongoDB or Redis.

Ittycheria acknowledges that some of the legal aspects of open-source were not completely thought through before, but things have changed with the new cloud era. After all, Redis Labs and MongoDB are not the only companies impacted by large cloud companies. Other open-source projects, like Elasticsearch, Kafka, Docker, Hadoop and Spark have also been offered on Amazon Web Services (AWS).

“The cloud provider is capturing all the value and giving little to nothing back to the community,” Ittycheria said. “We think this is bad for the open source industry.”

Now, more open source projects are considering adding similar licenses. For example, Neo4j, a database platform, added the Commons Clause. And database management systems CockroachDB and MariaDB have used similar multi-choice licensing models.

“We expect more of that activity,” Gupta said. “The biggest challenge is how do you protect your investment from being completely being poached by AWS or a vendor like them without them contributing back to the community? That’s the fundamental question that requires a solution.”

Amazon did not respond to a request for comment at the time of publication.

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