MongoDB for commercial use

Question

As I am pretty horrible in reading English legal documents I hoped one of you could answer this question.

In about a month I need to do an internship at a company for my bachelor. They would like me to develop a system for internal use (will not be sold) that requires a database.

They are allowing me a free hand (from what I understood) in selecting a database. As (as far as I understand atm) the data that needs to be stored does not contain a lot of relations (1 or 2) and is not heavily queried, I was thinking of using mongoDB as a back-end server.

Can mongoDB community be used freely in this type of an application under the new license? Most I find using Google involves the old license.

Answer 1

First of all, it's important to know why MongoDB adopted a new license for the product Community Server. This change was made as a response to a increasing number of cloud providers that are offering MongoDB database as a paid service to their users without playing by the open-source rules. Indeed, it's pretty unfair to have companies reselling the free version of a product you spent a lot of money to develop without contributing anything back.

As you can read in MongoDB new license's FAQ What specifically is the difference between the GPL and the SSPL:

A company that offers a publicly available MongoDB as a service must release the software it uses to offer such service under the terms of the SSPL, including the 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 source code made available.

That means that a company that offers MongoDB Community Version as a service to their users, must open the source code of the softwares developed to make that service work, like: monitoring tools, user interfaces, etc.

What changes to you: nothing.

Be the software you are developing for internal or external use, your company is just using MongoDB as a component of the project, not as the final product. So you are free to keep using it.