Interview: MongoDB cofounder Eliot Horowitz - 'I'd like to see a fair fight with the cloud providers'

Horowitz discusses MongoDB's licensing and how he wants to see more VC money being ploughed into core open source

This time last year, MongoDB controversially introduced a new software licence in a bid to tackle the problem, as the firm saw it, of cloud service providers (CSPs) selling hosted versions of its software without sufficiently contributing to the code base or offering recompense.

For those seeking to offer MongoDB as a service, the terms of the document database company's Server Side Public Licence (SSPL) are more restrictive than AGPL, the licence governing the rest of the code, the key clause being:

"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 Licence."

Two other open source firms, Redis Labs and Confluent, have similar measures in place.

The SSPL was submitted to the Open Source Initiative (OSI) for approval, but this application failed to pass, meaning that like the Confluent Community Licence and Redis' Source Available Licence, SSPL is not, strictly-speaking, an open-source licence.

At a MongoDB Local event in London last week, Computing asked CTO and co-founder Eliot Horowitz about how SSPL was working out. On the absense of OSI approval, he insisted the company remains dedicated to establishing a licence that is "broadly accepted by the FOSS [Free and Open Source Software] community."

In the meantime, although the SSPL is not officially open source, "MongoDB users are free to review, modify and distribute the software or redistribute modifications to the software in compliance with the licence. The vast majority of MongoDB features remain covered by an open-source licence. You never have to pay for it, you still have all the freedoms you had before, but the only difference is that we have updated it so that companies like Amazon or other providers can't just use it natively."

Open-source companies often struggle to monetise their wares. Charging for support and enterprise features is a tough way to make a living when the core product is free. MongoDB says it has spent $300m in R&D over the past decade.

Think about VC-backed companies where the core technology is open source - you can't name three - Eliot Horowitz

In theory, the SaaS model should offer great opportunities for open source projects to turn this situation around, Horowitz argued, providing a steady income stream while retaining the key advantage that codebases can be forked if the current proprietor "turns evil or becomes a bad steward". However, the current licensing regimes make open-source unattractive to investors.

"Because open-source licences today don't really make that easy, or don't make it safe, you don't see a lot of investment in open source," he said.

"Think about VC-backed companies where the core technology is open source - you can't name three. There are plenty of companies that take an open-source project and build a commercial entity around it - Datastax, Confluent - and it's a good model, but I want to see more VC-backed open source, more startups where their core technology is open source. That's what the SSPL is all about."

I'd like to see a fair fight with the cloud providers - Eliot Horowitz

Open-source companies who feel they are being treated unfairly by CSPs frequently point to AWS as the main culprit, accusing it of demoting the originals in its marketplace in favour of its own derivative versions. Indeed, AWS offers DocumentDB which the cloud behemoth describes as "a fully managed MongoDB-compatible database service designed from the ground up to be fast, scalable, and highly available".

However, AWS was also a sponsor of the MongoDB Local event. Isn't there some friction there?

"Sure, there's friction," Horowitz said, sidestepping the sponsorship question to focus on the goal of creating a level playing field. "I think most data fits a document model better than any other data model and I would love the debate to be around which document model is the best? Whose implementation is the best? I'd like to see a fair fight with the cloud providers and other providers".

He continued: "I think competition is healthy, and I think that our product's always going to be better than theirs. We're the ones innovating and we've been thinking about this for a long time. We're the ones adding new features. And I'm confident that ours will be better indefinitely."