Large and small companies are now engaged in open source, when asked why an open source project, or person in charge said that the contribution of the user community, either in hope by the power of the majority of the developers refine the project as a pretext, although these ideas stand the test may also be true, but in a more realistic behind this "purpose", companies are reluctant to mention, such as brand marketing needs, such as after the first open source "illegal" charges, such as KPI play, such as promoting the appropriate fee version of the sales ......
While there are open source open source personal / public interest organizations, open source projects as a basis for the commercialization of the company's open source, and commercial companies involved in open source to turn these differences in open source, open source is removed the original intention of a person with NGOs but not the table, left under relate to the company's open source, open source really think about them often do not really express, it actually can be understood, this is an open-source hacker-like behavior noble, too much to cover up this feature, it will bring resentment at company unfavorable.
But the fact is that the "real purpose behind the" fact often reached.
These companies are different and duplicity, recently accepted an interview with Computer Business Review when, MongoDB company CEO Dev Ittycheria clearly expressed intention of open source MongoDB: "Our open source is not to get help, to make our products better, but as freemium strategy to promote adoption . "
we didn’t open source it to get help from the community, to make the product better. We open sourced as a freemium strategy; to drive adoption.
When asked to modify Open Source License MongoDB related issues, Dev uttered these words. MongoDB 10 last year announced that it would switch from the open-source GNU AGPLv3 to License Server Side Public License (SSPL), in order to respond to the AWS cloud vendors such as MongoDB provides the user back to the community and not act as a service. SSPL clear requirements MongoDB instance hosted cloud vendor to obtain either a commercial license or open source its services to the community.
But the open source community seems to have a lot of opposition to this, many people believe that SSPL is targeted, it has serious discriminatory against certain categories of users, in violation of the true meaning of open source, so Fedora identified SSPL is not a free software license, red hat and Debian announced deleted from MongoDB release.
In this case, MongoDB CEO Dev believes do not care, he said:. "Since then, our business grow faster this has no effect, it only affects those who might consider using our free version, and as hosting services provided to third parties of people. "
And why MongoDB can be so calm it? Dev said MongoDB and other open-source companies are not the same, "and other open-source firms, we can control License to a certain extent because most other open source companies are built on existing technology," he says other open-source companies simply its non the core business of real things open out, and then enter the public domain, their nature is to make open source community crowdsourced research and development, improve the project better.
"By definition, open source License must be very loose, because it wants to encourage the development of open source projects and to better", Dev explained: "MongoDB is not the case, however, MongoDB MongoDB built by himself, no other experience in technical support." He added : "On one hand, this shows the MongoDB team of technical acumen; on the other hand, our open source is not to get help, to make our products better, but as a free value-added strategy to promote adoption."
Dev meaning of these words seems to be directly deny open source distributed collaboration and peer code review these basic characteristics, denied the contribution of MongoDB developers involved in project development, it is no wonder there are developers will respond directly represent insult : As a MongoDB source for the contribution of people have done a little bit, I heard that argument simply feel insulted.
And on the other hand , in fact, MongoDB is popular partly because of its broad driver support, although MongoDB company achieved a major driver for use with MongoDB, but it still relies on third-party developers to address less use of driving problems.
Ironically, although MongoDB CEO have said so explicitly, but MongoDB will continue with "open source" aura go.
However, back to contact the companies mentioned at the beginning of the "secretive", you will find this a little more representation MongoDB it true? What do you think?