Bad... for who, exactly? Bad for the hosts of MongDB, which the author seems to be, for sure, but amazing for companies not wanting to let Amazon eat up their customer base with their own work. The license should be treated the same way the Windows EULA should be: it's intended to make the code almost proprietary, except you can go digging into it to debug stuff. It's mostly as "source available" license.

> SSPL licensed products are not open-source

That is indeed a problem for open source supporters. With Mongo and Redis, you're stuck on older versions, requiring yourself or someone else to maintain it.

> SSPL is killing cloud and managed services competitors

Yeah, that's kind of the point of it.

> SSPL will rise hosting prices

The competition needing to make their own product to compete may indeed raise prices. However, one could argue that those prices were reduced to the level where no competition was possible in the first place.

> SSPL is killing open-source

[Citation needed]. SSPL is killing the free hosting that software development companies were giving you before, as far as I can see. Healthy open source communities won't switch over to SSPL.

> SSPL goal is probably not about fighting big firms, but more about getting money back to investors

The investors get their money back because the big firms can't compete.

If I was trying to make money on software I wrote, most of these points would make for a pretty compelling argument to choose SSPL over something like AGPL or GPLv3.

I think there are different kinds of Open Source. There's "Linux" open source, which is open source not because one person decides to, but there are countless stakeholders that have contributed their code, many of them with competing interests, all wanting to keep the code open. There is also "Redis open source": a product, developed by a single company, given away for free. The company does accept third party contributions, but the vast majority of code is written by a single core team, working together to make money. I would classify the latter type of open source as "open source as a product". The openness isn't based on some kind of core value, or some kind of project management design decision, but as a way to market the product and get it in the hands of as many people as possible until investor funds start drying up.

I'm sure it sucks having to write plans to overthrow your company's entire software stack after having bought into these technologies, but any "open source" project backed by only one company can disappear or go proprietary at any point, without warning.

I think it's telling that there is no active open-source version of MongoDB, not even one maintained by Amazon. There's FerretDB, which is also company-backed (though that company is still small), but that seems to be a competitor using the same API rather than a direct Mongo fork. Either MongoDB's open source contributors didn't really care about their work going SSPL, or there was no open source community to maintain and support MongoDB in the first place.

With Redis, I hope things go differently. I hope someone will set up an open source fork, and I hope everyone will flock to that. It happened to ElasticSearch, in the form of OpenSearch, and perhaps it can happen again. However, SSPL isn't the problem here; it's merely a symptom of a bigger problem: the productisation of open source, and the ease with which people will accept these productised open source projects as if the license can never change.