
Ask HN: Is MongoDB still an open source company? - ossfan1234
I&#x27;m afraid not, not even close. Yes, I know what &quot;open source&quot; means - read on. The public availability of source code is just one part of &quot;open source&quot; tenets.<p>1. Community
Open source is software of the community, by the community and for the community.For mongodb it appears open source is a distribution strategy - there is no community participation. Now that they have achieved widespread distribution they could care less about open source.<p>Rumour is rife that the company is actively suing partners who are using the term &quot;mongo&quot; in either the product name or the domain name. My sources tell me that the recent rename of MongoLab to Mlab is a direct result of a trademark infringement notice sent by mongodb. I hear the same narrative from multiple other &quot;partners&quot; of mongodb. How is this any way to build an OSS ecosystem? Why would an ISV or OSS developer build tools for mongodb only to be sued by mongodb when they start to make money? Imagine the havoc that would ensue if Linus decides to enforce trademarks or licensing for Linux?<p>2. Enterprise vs Community
The feature differences between Enterprise and community versions of mongodb have started to get larger and larger with every release. Open source software does not mean &quot;inferior&quot; software or &quot;crippled&quot; software.<p>3. Controlled by a single company
One of the original goals of open source is to prevent the control of a single company over the software we use. To me it looks like mongodb is a step backwards in this direction.<p>Mongodb &quot;the product&quot; has some very good things going for it but dissatisfaction with Mongodb &quot;the company&quot; is fairly widespread.<p>My prediction is that very soon there will be a high profile open source fork of mongodb driven by an Apache style board and community. For now the only fork I can find is &quot;Percona server for MongoDB&quot; which seems a better fit for the OSS model. I am going to switch to Percona till my long term prediction comes true.
======
bliti
JSON support in postgresql will slowly kill mongo. I moved to it from mongo
and it's sooooooo much better.

------
vorg
> My prediction is that very soon there will be a high profile open source
> fork of mongodb driven by an Apache style board and community

That won't solve any of the problems. The symptoms you describe also happen in
the Apache Groovy "community", if you can call it that. Although they joined
Apache's incubator in April last year (2015) and were promoted to a full
project in November, the project manager "chair" privately owns the groovy-
lang.org DNS name and if you click on most links for Groovy at Apache, they
redirect to groovy-lang.org without any warning. He also keeps a private
mailing list of groovy users which he collected by running a weekly newsletter
for a year which he no longer maintains, and hasn't merged them with the
Apache Groovy users mailing list. They run a separate build system for Groovy
treating the Apache process as an add-on process, all against Apache
guidelines. He refuses to refer to Groovy as "Apache Groovy" on first use
which is what the ASF requires of project managers.

Joining Apache is just another distribution strategy for them, despite the
talk in Groovy circles a year ago about getting a proper governance structure.
It didn't solve Groovy's problems, and it won't solve MongoDB's.

------
eip
Why not just switch to an entirely different database?

------
ddorian43
I think mongodb was always like that.

