MongoDB's SSPL

 October 18, 2018

A couple of days ago, Eliot Horowitz, CTO & co-founder of MongoDB announced that MongoDB is moving from the AGPL to the SSPL license.

The SSPL is a new license, just created by MongoDB. In the post, Eliot points out that they created the SSPL starting from the AGPL, and he affirms that the new license guarantees all the freedoms the AGPL does. I firmly believe that the SSPL is not a FLOSS license since it limits the possibility of the cloud providers to provide an “as a service” version of it. This case might seem trivial and an edge case, but the complete freedom of usage is one of the FLOSS movement and licenses pillars.