Much of what you say about the lack of clarity is fair, but we hope that those things will be resolved when the SSPL gains OSI certification. In the meanwhile, we will do our best to 1) listen closely to the specific arguments as to what is unclear, and 2) attempt to dispel what we see as misunderstandings, often prompted by what is essentially FUD.
I appreciate your suggestions on what other licensing options we have. I think you really get what we are trying to do. That strategy is exactly how MongoDB has sold its enterprise edition for years. With apologies if I'm pointing you to something you've already read, we think the current landscape of the tech industry makes that insufficient, as our CTO's announcement post goes into: https://www.mongodb.com/blog/post/mongodb-now-released-under...
Anyhow, I do want to address this:
> It creates all sorts of headaches. And conveniently your company's way to solve that is a commercial license.
I think this is unfair. Everything we have said about the SSPL makes clear that it has one very exclusive set of targets in mind: large scale cloud providers with the means to strip-mine not just MongoDB, but any open source project with significant traction. And the one actual data point in this conversation supports that position: fatbird posted that they were on a sales call with MongoDB recently, specifically asked if they were affected by the license change, and were told "no". Is that a legally binding rider to the SSPL? Of course, not, but if the plan for the SSPL was to use it to wring money out of community users, wouldn't the answer have been "yes"?
If you've already read that announcement post, or if you now do, would you let me know if it makes anything clearer?
