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> because mongo protocol is proprietary

No. It's because Mongo is AGPL in your case.

If you used a brand new implementation of whatever protocol Mongo uses that's under a less restrictive license than AGPL, you would not trigger any obligation to share the source code.

"Proprietary" in "Proprietary protocol" pretty much means "specific" / "non-standard". And you can't legally prevent someone to reimplement your proprietary protocol. I don't even think you can copyright the protocol itself. You can copyright the documentation / specification document at best, and actual implementations of it.

In "proprietary software", though, "proprietary" means "non-tree", that is, not open-source as defined by the OSD / not free software as defined by the FSF / the GNU project. The meaning of this word is very different in those two separate concepts.



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