You seem to be misinterpreting legal terms again:

> Now that you have accepted our license terms ...

> "now that you have licensed ...

That is not how licenses work. Licenses cannot be forced on either party, nor can they force terms after being granted; that'd be extortion. Neither Lasercomb nor SanDisk forced their licenses or subsequent terms on their licensees, nor am I alleging (as you seem to paraphrase) that Mongo does.

The misunderstanding you seem to have is that a license term such as "If you agree to this license, you MUST ..." can be interpreted as "Now that you have accepted this license, you MUST ...". It can't. All three of Lasercomb, SanDisk, and MongoDB's SSPL use the former and not the latter.

> You are allowed to simply /not/ use Mongo. You have an out.

As did the licensees of Lasercomb and SanDisk to simply not use the respective licensed works. That did not stop those two licensors from being in legal jeopardy, and from their licenses being invalid. And when a license is invalid, _any and all_ use of the copyrighted work under that license becomes copyright infringement.

> then they just can't provide Mongo as a service.

And here you introduce another kernel of the problem with the SSPL. It does not define what a "Service" is, leaving it vague and so open to interpretation, that MongoDB Inc. can change their mind later and sue even users not providing MongoDB-as-a-service. This inability (or omission) of the license to answer the question "What is a service" leaves me as a potential user in a very gray area. This has all been discussed many times over [0].

The only safe play is to not use the copyrighted work at all. Which leaves, as I say above, "the only legally safe way to use MongoDB is to pay MongoDB Inc. to host it."

> You've misunderstood me. I mean that providers lose the ability to use closed source code in the providing of the service. The statement you were quoting was said with the presumption that "you" (in the general sense) were the provider of the service, who also owned the copyright to said closed source code used to provide said service, and that the thing lost was the ability to keep that software closed-source.

You said, "The only “safety” you lose is that of owning the copyright to closed source software". One (owning the copyright) has nothing to do with the other (keeping the software closed-source), so I don't know why you would include the former if all you wanted to say was the latter.

> What, because some committee says it isn't?

No, because it does not meet the industry-accepted definition.

> open-source in the colloquial sense, as in "I can read the source code, modify it, and run it if I wish."

1. You can't just "run it if I wish" as you please; and

2. That is NOT the definition of open-source; that is the definition of shared-source, or source-available. If MongoDB wanted to make their source available under those terms, they should have, instead of trying to abuse the term 'open source'. If you want to use a piece of software under shared-source terms, feel free, but please don't try to jam it to others as if that's open source, because such twisting of terms harms the industry.

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0: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18301116