the Zealous

In the realm of food safety advocacy, few names hold as much weight as Bill Marler. With a formidable track record of holding food producers accountable and championing reform, Marler has solidified his position as a driving force in the fight against foodborne illnesses, working to ensure the health and safety of our food supply, in the US and around the world.

Marler's transformation to food safety champion began in the early 1990s, when he represented victims of the infamous Jack in the Box hamburger E. coli outbreak.  Poisoned: The True Story of the Deadly E. coli Outbreak that Changed the Way Americans Eat, by best-selling author Jeff Benedict, chronicles the Jack in the Box outbreak and the rise of Bill Marler as a food safety attorney. The book is now the basis of a Netflix documentary of the same name.

MongoDB is a popular documents-oriented database, the source code of which is licensed under an open source license, the Server Side Public License (SSPL).¹

The SSPL is based on the Affero General Public License v3 (AGPL). Until 2018, the AGPL applied to MongoDB source code. AGPL was replaced with the SSPL in response to cloud hosting providers like Amazon making use of a MongoDB clone as a service. The only meaningful difference between the AGPL and the SSPL is the copyleft provision.

AGPL has a copyleft provision that requires the source code of modified versions of the licensed program be made available to all users who interact with the software over a network. That is, if you modify the program and use it in your cloud-bases application or service, you must make those modifications and the program itself available in source code form.

Mongo replaced this copyleft provision with a new version—copyleft on steroids.

Errors and Omissions, est. 2017, is a query dedicated to anonymous descriptions of fuck-ups or near fuck-ups, as well as valuable advice.

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