I know this is just reopening a discussion that HN has had a million times, but what mongo (and elastic, and so on) swapped to is not IMO a rugpull to anyone except those who were reselling those specific open source projects. Anyone using those tools internally/as a backend weren't affected by that, whether they were a hobbyist or small business. The exception being people who only want true FOSS for ideological reasons.
The trouble with the SSPL is that it also nerd-snipes people who think the legal system works like code. Example of such a person: https://ssplisbad.com/
As far as I can tell reading the license, the key terms of the SSPL hinges on "such that a user could run an instance of the service using the Service Source Code you make available". If you make something available that is then able to be run, then you've fulfilled the license.
Looking at it again the page I linked above actually goes beyond overly-strict interpretation into actual bad-faith reading. When talking about what you have to publish, they cut off the sentence short so that they can interpret it mean things like the BIOS or IDE, but reading the actual license text it's clear that's not the case. "All programs that you use to make the Program or modified version" vs "all programs that you use to make the Program or modified version available"
As someone who only runs FOSS in my day-to-day, and not anything with SSPL, I'm really annoyed that that page nerd-sniped me into defending the SSPL.
the main trouble with the sspl is that it isn't an open-source license, which is a problem for people who only want true foss for practical reasons, not just ideological reasons. reselling is one of the rights that an open-source license protects, and historically speaking, everyone having that right has been absolutely critical to the development of things like linux, gcc, x-windows, ffmpeg, emacs, postgres, and wikipedia; without it, not only wouldn't we have objective-c support (contributed by next against their will) or linux distributions (like slackware, red hat, debian, and especially ubuntu), we also wouldn't have wikipedia quotes in google serps, or android
a secondary problem with it is that, as you point out, the sspl is so vague that you can never be sure that you're in compliance with it, and it's never been litigated, so there's no precedent
it sounds like you have a pretty weak grasp both of how the legal system works and of the history of free software licensing. actual bad-faith reading is literally the job description of a lawyer
Bad-faith readings are the job of a lawyer, but what I pointed out goes beyond a bad-faith reading. It's a literal lie, made by truncating a sentence. If you were to say "Nazis are the greatest evil the world has seen", and a lawyer in court quoted you as saying "Nazis are the greatest", that's not a lawyer's standard bad faith reading.
If you think the above would be legally permissible then I'm afraid you're incorrect regarding which of us has a "pretty weak grasp of how the legal system works".
The trouble with the SSPL is that it also nerd-snipes people who think the legal system works like code. Example of such a person: https://ssplisbad.com/
As far as I can tell reading the license, the key terms of the SSPL hinges on "such that a user could run an instance of the service using the Service Source Code you make available". If you make something available that is then able to be run, then you've fulfilled the license.
Looking at it again the page I linked above actually goes beyond overly-strict interpretation into actual bad-faith reading. When talking about what you have to publish, they cut off the sentence short so that they can interpret it mean things like the BIOS or IDE, but reading the actual license text it's clear that's not the case. "All programs that you use to make the Program or modified version" vs "all programs that you use to make the Program or modified version available"
As someone who only runs FOSS in my day-to-day, and not anything with SSPL, I'm really annoyed that that page nerd-sniped me into defending the SSPL.