> To be clear, the SSPL and similar fauxpen source licenses are unambiguously not free or open source.

You know, i can understand why such licenses becoming a reality was inevitable, look at what AWS did with Elastic Search: https://www.elastic.co/blog/why-license-change-AWS

Open source licenses aren't entirely viable when you're a company that wants to exist and not have your product and market be stolen by giants that have no problem throwing their weight around like that.

> The controversy comes from some people not considering that to be a problem.

I disagree with this way of framing it, however. In my eyes, the controversy is from the fact that the license itself is essentially "the nuclear option":

> 13. Offering the Program as a Service.

> If you make the functionality of the Program or a modified version available to third parties as a service, you must make the Service Source Code available via network download to everyone at no charge, under the terms of this License. Making the functionality of the Program or modified version available to third parties as a service includes, without limitation, enabling third parties to interact with the functionality of the Program or modified version remotely through a computer network, offering a service the value of which entirely or primarily derives from the value of the Program or modified version, or offering a service that accomplishes for users the primary purpose of the Program or modified version.

> “Service Source Code” means the Corresponding Source for the Program or the modified version, and the Corresponding Source for all programs that you use to make the Program or modified version available as a service, including, without limitation, management software, user interfaces, application program interfaces, automation software, monitoring software, backup software, storage software and hosting software, all such that a user could run an instance of the service using the Service Source Code you make available.

If there is a company out there that offered MongoDB as a service, new versions suddenly become non viable, thus killing the entire company unless they pivot to something else, in lieu of them being forced to publish almost ALL of their source code, which may or may not lead to their competitors just stealing it, unless it would be licensed under SSPL as well (then again, who's to say that they wouldn't ignore it, since the small company probably wouldn't have the resources to pursue all that much litigation).

I doubt people care much about what is or isn't truly free or open source software as far as fitting some definition or set of ideals goes, much like very few people care what codecs are used to record videos that they might end up in, short of Mr Stallman himself. Hence, in my eyes, the actual controversy lies elsewhere, how this license goes way beyond what GPL forces you to do to comply with it.

I'm not sure whether MongoDB or Elastic Search will be around in 10 years, since this severely limits how competitive hosting providers can be out there, unless they build their stuff with the intent of publishing all of their source (and possibly getting breached numerous times due to all of their flaws being openly on display now) from day 1.