Database maker MongoDB has become the second company to switch licences in a bid to make money, changing its licence from the AGPL version 3 to something called the Server Side Public Licence, in order to prevent companies that use it as a service from not paying, either in code or cash.

Debian GNU/Linux developer Chris Lamb is taking the fight to those pushing the Commons Clause, a non-free licence, by setting up a two-man team to fork modules that add functionality to the in-memory database Redis, after the company that makes Redis put the modules under this licence and started to charge for them. Lamb is the current leader of the project but said he was doing this in a private capacity.

Free Software Foundation chairman Richard Stallman has described the Commons Clause licence as "ill-named" because it is a non-free licence that does not provide the four freedoms mandated by the FSF.