In this special episode recorded at
All Things Open, I talk with
Peter Farkas, CEO and co-founder of
FerretDB. We talked about about MongoDB and the license change fiasco and why Peter wanted to build an open source company and never considered building a non-open source company.
The biggest 🤯 in this episode was about enforcing what it means to be open source; in particular, FerretDB positions itself as a truly open source alternative to MongoDB, and has received threatening letters from MongoDB as a result. How do you enforce it when a company claims to be open source but does not use an OSI-approved license? How well do the average users actually understand the license implications, and if a big company says they have an open source license even though it’s source-available, not open source, how much will people understand the difference?
If you want another perspective on the enforcement of advertising around open source licenses, listen to the
episode I recorded with
Stefano Maffulli, also at All Things Open.