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If Amazon or Microsoft creates services that sell what I sell, what's the impact at the top of the channel? What does that do to cement MongoDB as an excellent choice for users at the top of the channel? The answer is it jacks it up. Amazon has this Chef service, they sell it for money and they do revenue share. So the... |
So what's happening when the Redis and the Mongos of the world look at that problem is they decide that the top of the funnel doesn't get bigger, or that they don't care about it getting bigger, and instead they care about the extraction at the bottom of the funnel. So they're nervous about it. They're like "Oh, Amazon... |
A good example is Elastic. Amazon has had an Elastic service running for as long as Elastic has been monetizable, basically... And Elastic went public, that whole time, with Amazon as a competitor. But you know what - I've ran Elasticsearch, I use it as a component in my product; one of the reasons is that it was a dom... |
So from a business point of view they're making these decisions because they believe that that's what's best for the extraction of capital/revenue at the bottom of the channel, and they're doing it at the expense of the spread at the top of the channel. |
**Jerod Santo:** In your case, you've got a rev share with Amazon. Is that the case with Mongo or with Redis, or was that unique to Chef? And would that change your outlook at all if that rev share was gone? |
**Adam Jacob:** It's not the same. I don't know -- I was certainly not privy to whatever negotiations they may have had... I know the ones I had. You know, one of the things that Amazon, or any partner, anybody who's gonna run your code as a service needs is the assurance that they'll always be able to provide that ser... |
One of the reasons that that rev share exists is because so much of those assurances about what's in the open was in the open. Even more so now. That doesn't mean that that's always what Amazon will do, or even what they should, but that's how it worked for us. If it didn't exist, it wouldn't really change my point of ... |
If you look at Mongo's performance, if you look at Atlas' sales numbers, it continues to go up. It was going up before they changed the license, and the reason is it's a good product, and it's a better product than the one that you receive if you just turn on DocumentDB on Azure. Because it's kind of bare bones when yo... |
The idea that that competition in open source, where the reason you're here is because you have this massive channel - it doesn't make much business sense to me, but that's the conclusion we would come to. I understand how you get there, but it doesn't make much sense. |
**Jerod Santo:** Aren't disruptive products though not necessarily better? They're usually actually worse, but they're good enough, and the cost is disruptive. So in the case of an AWS version of Mongo - yeah, it's not gonna be as good or as maybe well supported, or have as many features as Mongo's version of Mongo, bu... |
**Adam Jacob:** Well, but here's the thing... So this is where we come back to the funnel. Now we're back to the business. So - sure, maybe Amazon -- but this is why it's good business for Amazon, to launch your stuff as a service, instead of just compete with you directly. So you brilliantly elucidated why they would ... |
So the size of that funnel, your possible monetization gets bigger, hugely bigger than it was before. And in that moment, your ability to capture that revenue - every single one of those cut-rate DocumentDB users is a potential lead that's already using your product. So all you have to do is go find them and be like "Y... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** I think those kinds of ideas though sometimes seem so logical, but yet not everybody thinks like that. |
**Adam Jacob:** Yeah. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** So I think it's a great idea, of how can you leverage the fact that these platforms are so massive that they actually become your marketing channel for you. |
**Adam Jacob:** They are your marketing channel for you. And the only thing you have to give up is that they're also going to monetize some number of your customers. Back to open source's punk-rockness, right? There's, like, an F the man vibe, where like when you're saying that Amazon's a net-positive for your business... |
**Jerod Santo:** It's like that commercial where the guy is like "Um, sir, you are the man." Do you remember that commercial? |
**Adam Jacob:** Yeah. Like, who exactly are we protecting here? Because the last time I checked, they were public and killing it. |
**Break:** \[16:16\] |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Next up is Heather Meeker. Heather is a well-respected open source lawyer and a specialist in open source software licensing and strategy. She wrote the book Open Source for Business, and it serves as a guide to open source software licensing. We're talking to Heather because she's a lawyer who wrot... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Heather, let's open up with the SSPL - you were the person behind writing it, is that correct? |
**Heather Meeker:** Yes, I helped MongoDB draft the license, with of course the help of Mongo legal counsel and their business team. I think it's fair to say that I led the drafting of it. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Gotcha. And the full title of it is "The server-side public license"? |
**Heather Meeker:** Yes, that's right. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Take us back to the early days of drafting it... What's it intended to do? What's the goal of this license? |
**Heather Meeker:** SSPL was drafted in order to meet a need in a particular way. I'll explain what I mean by that. At the time - and this would have been late 2018 to early 2019 - many companies that were providing software under open source licenses were very concerned about the use of the software by cloud services ... |
At that time there were actually quite a few companies, and most of these, by the way, were companies in what I would call the platform software space, or middleware software space. And they were trying to figure out what to do about that. They basically went down two different routes. The first route was the source av... |
Mongo, on the other hand, wanted to see if they could create a license that was an open source license, but that managed this issue. And that's how the SSPL came about. They drafted the license, submitted it to Open Source Initiative for approval as an open source license, and eventually it was withdrawn after quite a ... |
**Jerod Santo:** What happened in that proceeding? What were the deciding factors? I guess they didn't reject it, but it was just being debated to a certain degree, and then it was withdrawn eventually. I assume it was withdrawn because it was not going anywhere... Or was there a different reason for withdrawing it? |
**Heather Meeker:** It was a long and fraught debate, and the debate had to do with a number of concerns. I would encourage anybody who's interested to go and read the archives of what's called License Review, or License Discuss... But I'll try to summarize, understanding that there were a lot of comments and I can't s... |
**Jerod Santo:** Sure. |
**Heather Meeker:** The first was technical commentary about whether the license met the open source definition. So there is a definition of open source, there's also a free software definition... One of the main tenets of that definition is that the license can't have any license restrictions. So that would be source ... |
So there were those aspects, and there were some comments about that aspect of the license. There were also a lot of comments about who had drafted it, the process by which it was drafted, and what Mongo's intent was in creating the license. So those were meta comments; not about the license itself, but about the conte... |
**Jerod Santo:** Okay. And so do you think that -- I mean, I don't know if bias is... As the author of the SSPL, do you believe that the SSPL represents even the spirit of open source, if it's not officially an open source license, or do you think it's something different? |
**Heather Meeker:** Well, we drafted it to fit the open source definition. And as a lawyer, you have to have concrete things to go on, and the open source definition is what we had. I think the discussion brought out that people felt that there was something beyond meeting the open source definition that needed to be s... |
So we looked at the open source definition, we definitely avoided license restrictions, we avoided things that were discriminatory according to the requirements of the OSD... But all of the meta issues were things that really kind of couldn't be addressed by the draft itself. |
**Jerod Santo:** There is some discrimination built-in though, right? Or how does it actually work in order to stop that particular problem that was trying to be addressed? Doesn't that discriminate in the use...? I know we get into legalese here, but you're good at this, so help me understand. |
**Heather Meeker:** I would say not discriminatory, because in a way all copyleft licenses apply different conditions when you do different things. So if you use discriminatory in that way, then GPL2 is discriminatory, because it only applies certain conditions to redistributors. So that is actually fair game in copyle... |
**Jerod Santo:** Okay. |
**Heather Meeker:** SSPL applied specific conditions to use of the software -- I'm paraphrasing now, but software as a service to provide the same functionality of the software. So yes, there were conditions that were imposed in those situations that weren't imposed otherwise, but that I think for most people isn't the... |
**Jerod Santo:** You can use it for good, but nor for evil. |
**Heather Meeker:** Well, it's interesting that you say that, because there is now a new licensing movement called the Ethical Licensing Movement, that actually does impose conditions based on ethical concerns and moral concerns, and those are clearly not open source licenses, because they actually do impose license re... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** I'd heard about this too, where -- I believe it was in China, there was a specific license about companies that didn't adhere to work ethics. I think it was like 999, or something like that... |
**Heather Meeker:** The Anti-996 License. |
**Jerod Santo:** Yeah, that's right. |
**Heather Meeker:** That was actually very interesting, if you'll permit me to make a comment about it... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Please, yeah. |
**Heather Meeker:** It was first of all a very well-drafted license. It was professionally done. It did address labor conditions, and again, I'm paraphrasing, but the license says you can't use the software if you are violating the international labor standards. And it was intended to raise consciousness about labor pr... |
**Break:** \[25:58\] |
**Adam Stacoviak:** It's interesting how there's so many usages of licenses... And you'd mentioned the OSI approval process and how it was contextual in terms of Mongo's intent of the license change, and the intent of the SSPL license in general... And you also mentioned the OSD and its criteria in your blog post on th... |
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