That's what they claim, they're not a neutral party and other people who've looked at it say it's not so clear. The FAQ is non-binding, the license text itself is what matters.
If you make the functionality of the Program or a modified version available to third parties as a service, you must make the Service Source Code available via network download to everyone at no charge, under the terms of this License
where does it say otherwise? it starts with "if" meaning only this condition has to be applied and for nothing else
> make the functionality [...] available [...] as a service
This isn't well defined is the problem. What they obviously mean is 'don't offer MongoDB as a service', but this could easily be interpreted far more broadly.
If you consider offering a complex, customizable piece of software (like Jira), where your customers can add custom fields and write custom queries, one could reasonably argue you're offering access to MongoDB under a different interface.
Imagine I'm running an MMO game where users can store arbitrary items in a stash, and then search for them based on various criteria. I would like to implement this stash as a Mongo DB instance for each user, and translate the user searches into MongoDB queries. Am I offering MongoDB as a service to my users, or using it as a DB?
