Even if the commercial/AGPL/GPL ones "win" for a few years, they won't be able to compete with these more Open licensed DBs when they catch up.
So at any given moment, too many DBs may be annoying, but for the long term and long game it is important there is this type of competition & research going on.
Although, I absolutely agree, when it comes to Master-Slave based systems (I've been very vocal in criticizing them) that market is drying up to some very limited use cases (banking, etc.). 99%+ of use cases will be Strong Eventual Consistency and CRDT with distributed or decentralized/P2P tools.
Some really old, yet very relevant, thoughts on this subject:
I'm thourghly confused by your association of (a)GPL and commercial and calling apach/bad licenses more open. AGPL ensures that users always retain the 4 freedoms, by restricting developers. BSD allows developers to do whatever, including restricting the users. Neither is "more open", they both make trade offs and neither is comparable to proprietary except to say the BSD style licences allow for it if the developer chooses.
Look at the kurfuffle around mongo, redis, and elastic search because of their licenses. However, you don't hear the same issues coming from the postgres community. The licenses you're claiming will win the day cause problems for for-profit I companies, for exactly the reason you think they're "more open".
In the end, either entrenched proprietary software or open, community-focused, community-stewarded software will win the day.
I believe we both have reasonable arguments from our paradigm, it is just the paradigms have conflicting definitions.
When people who share camp with me say "Open" or "Freedom" we mean Free Speech AND Free Beer.
Where the disagreement happens is on Free Speech:
There are many people/governments that define Free Speech as "Free Speech as long as someone does not shout 'fire' in a crowded room." This is the spirit of (a)GPL in restricting people.
The other group defines Free Speech and/or "Freedom" as "without restriction". Not because they want people to yell "fire" but because they attribute restriction/regulation as the mechanism towards monopoly & centralization. Not that regulation/restriction on its own is bad (every individual ought exercise self-discipline), but it is particularly dangerous once monopoly & centralization emerges because it produces totalitarian or fascist structures.
To counter my own view, many people in the camp opposite of me, have expressed same end-goal concerns "we want to restrict hate speech so fascism doesn't rise". I think it is admirable we have shared-goals (stopping totalitarianism), but for reasons you probably don't share, I think it is more effective to stop fascism by removing the ability for fascists to enforce rules/regulation/restrictions on individuals, even if that comes at the cost or risk of someone yelling "fire".
Why? (I don't assume anyone cares about my view, so don't feel obligated to read) Because I have higher optimism that humans will eventually overcome their individual immaturity (shouting "pen--" in a crowd), especially through incentive design, than in humans overcoming their tendency towards abuse of power (or even worse, most people who "abuse" power don't think they are abusing it, they have a conviction that the use of power is for some greater good). Wielding power is often the end game of any incentive structure, but yelling "fire" or "p--is" often ruins your reputation/power so naturally is disincentivized over time (or where it matters most).
I feel like your "fire" and "totalitarian" examples are confusing, entirely off-base and non-illustrative of anything useful to this conversation.
Why? Because the difference between copyleft and non-copyleft licenses isn't akin to censorship vs no-censorship. The argument for the copyleft is more akin to the arguments for laws in general: someone's absolute freedoms needs to be troddened on to have a free society.
I similarly fail to see how a copyleft is a power to abuse. Surely the ability to close the source of an application has more power that can be abused?
Your 2nd paragraph says pretty much what I was trying to say (except for difference in law views) that your 1st paragraph says is off-base.
Another way for me to say it is, that of course you would think my thoughts are off-base since I come from a different foundational base as you. I was just trying to explain the difference itself, not saying that you need to change views (your view is logical from your "base").
You think people's freedoms need to be trodden upon for a free society.
I don't. That scares me and many others.
Edit: I did not downvote you, just FYI, I don't know who/why would.
> You think people's freedoms need to be trodden upon for a free society.
Do you take this stance with laws against murder and theft? Society has laws and rules. People as a whole, as all available examples show, do not optimize for the greater good by default and without any rules or norms.
There are good talking points to the copyleft debate, but that copyleft imposes rules and non-copleft doesn't is false and doesn't move this debate forward in any meaningful way.
Even if the commercial/AGPL/GPL ones "win" for a few years, they won't be able to compete with these more Open licensed DBs when they catch up.
So at any given moment, too many DBs may be annoying, but for the long term and long game it is important there is this type of competition & research going on.
Although, I absolutely agree, when it comes to Master-Slave based systems (I've been very vocal in criticizing them) that market is drying up to some very limited use cases (banking, etc.). 99%+ of use cases will be Strong Eventual Consistency and CRDT with distributed or decentralized/P2P tools.
Some really old, yet very relevant, thoughts on this subject:
https://hackernoon.com/the-implications-of-rethinkdb-and-par...