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Citus Unforks from PostgreSQL, Goes Open Source

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Re: Citus Unforks from PostgreSQL, Goes Open Source

#61

Post by X86BSD »

tspiteri wrote: post #51
X86BSD wrote: post #31

AGPL? This is dead in the water :( It will never be integrated into PG. What a shame. It should have been a 2 clause BSDL. Sigh.

The BSDL does not make much economic sense to the company open sourcing their code; a new competitor would fork the code, make closed improvements, and merge any changes from the open source code. That means that the competitor is always gaining by a one-way flow of improvements. To use open source code, the more permissive the license the better. But to actually open your own code, BSDL is a very tough sell. That's…

So you take a BSDL codebase, fork it, close it, make proprietary changes, profiting from the BSDL codebase, then slap the PG community in the face by open sourcing it under a more restrictive license hoping to benefit from the community you just slapped in the face but restricting competition.

They are of course free to release their code under any license they wish. I just think releasing code under the *GPL when you profited from a liberal BSDL is a douche nozzle thing to do. But knock yourself out! This tells me all I need to know about the company.

Re: Citus Unforks from PostgreSQL, Goes Open Source

#63

Post by jgreen10 »

reitanqild wrote: post #52
jgreen10 wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, people use MongoDB... AGPL only requires open sourcing any modifications you make to the software when you give users direct access to a server running the software, which seems like something you would never want to do in case of a database. You can use database servers running AGPL software in a closed source SaaS: http://www.gnu.org/licenses/why-affero-gpl.en.html

MongoDB used to distribute drivers under a more permissive license for this exact reason IIRC.

Well, applications that want to use Citus can just use whichever PostgreSQL client is available.

Re: Citus Unforks from PostgreSQL, Goes Open Source

#64

Post by singlow »

kod wrote: post #35
hlandau wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nope. https://www.devever.net/~hl/agplunenforceable

This is a really bad argument, probably wouldn't stand up in court, and in any case doesn't have precedent. Hint: How did you (the developer) originally acquire a _copy_ of the AGPL'd sourcecode?

I don't think acquiring a copy is an act of distribution by the acquirer. Besides, the copy you received while acquiring it was not modified by you, so that would not affect the modified version which was never published. AGPL cannot change the definition of the word publish to be different than that of the U.S. Copyright Code.

Re: Citus Unforks from PostgreSQL, Goes Open Source

#65

Post by kod »

bryanlarsen wrote: post #40
kod wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a really bad argument, probably wouldn't stand up in court, and in any case doesn't have precedent. Hint: How did you (the developer) originally acquire a _copy_ of the AGPL'd sourcecode?

Not only that: running the app requires copying it into memory; editing files requires making copies; deploying it to your production servers requires making copies.

Copying it into memory solely in order to run it probably isn't an issue

https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/117

Re: Citus Unforks from PostgreSQL, Goes Open Source

#66

Post by singlow »

bryanlarsen wrote: post #40
kod wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a really bad argument, probably wouldn't stand up in court, and in any case doesn't have precedent. Hint: How did you (the developer) originally acquire a _copy_ of the AGPL'd sourcecode?

Not only that: running the app requires copying it into memory; editing files requires making copies; deploying it to your production servers requires making copies.

U.S. Copyright code allows you to make copies into memory or otherwise if it is required in order to utilize the software.

https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/117

Re: Citus Unforks from PostgreSQL, Goes Open Source

#67

Post by batbomb »

ozgune wrote: post #22
no1youknowz wrote: post #10

This is awesome. I have experience with running a CitusDB cluster and it pretty much solved a lot of the scaling problems I was having at the time. For it to go open source now, is of huge benefit to the future projects I have. > With the release of newly open sourced Citus v5.0, pg_shard's codebase has been merged into Citus... This is fantastic, sounds like the setup process is much simpler. I wonder if they have i…

(Ozgun from Citus Data) We're working on making Citus masterless. In all openness, we evaluated two different approaches to this in the past six months, and wrapped up the design for one. This design works well on the cloud, and we already demonstrated a working version: https://youtu.be/_nun2S6EdWo?t=411 For on-premise deployments, the primary challenge is set-up complexity. We're now prototyping one of those design…

Can Citus handle geospatial sharding?

Re: Citus Unforks from PostgreSQL, Goes Open Source

#68

Post by kod »

singlow wrote: post #64
kod wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a really bad argument, probably wouldn't stand up in court, and in any case doesn't have precedent. Hint: How did you (the developer) originally acquire a _copy_ of the AGPL'd sourcecode?

I don't think acquiring a copy is an act of distribution by the acquirer. Besides, the copy you received while acquiring it was not modified by you, so that would not affect the modified version which was never published. AGPL cannot change the definition of the word publish to be different than that of the U.S. Copyright Code.

You don't own the copyright. You don't have the right to download it on to your hard drive (aka "reproduce the copyrighted work in copies"), except to the extent AGPL allows you to.

Re: Citus Unforks from PostgreSQL, Goes Open Source

#69

Post by tspiteri »

X86BSD wrote: post #61
tspiteri wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The BSDL does not make much economic sense to the company open sourcing their code; a new competitor would fork the code, make closed improvements, and merge any changes from the open source code. That means that the competitor is always gaining by a one-way flow of improvements. To use open source code, the more permissive the license the better. But to actually open your own code, BSDL is a very tough sell. That's…

So you take a BSDL codebase, fork it, close it, make proprietary changes, profiting from the BSDL codebase, then slap the PG community in the face by open sourcing it under a more restrictive license hoping to benefit from the community you just slapped in the face but restricting competition. They are of course free to release their code under any license they wish. I just think releasing code under the *GPL when yo…

I don't agree with you. The PG community is, I think, fine with that: that's exactly what the BSDL allows that the GPL doesn't, and they chose the BSDL. If the PG community don't like that, I really don't understand why they chose the BSDL.

Re: Citus Unforks from PostgreSQL, Goes Open Source

#70

Post by mixedCase »

X86BSD wrote: post #61
tspiteri wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The BSDL does not make much economic sense to the company open sourcing their code; a new competitor would fork the code, make closed improvements, and merge any changes from the open source code. That means that the competitor is always gaining by a one-way flow of improvements. To use open source code, the more permissive the license the better. But to actually open your own code, BSDL is a very tough sell. That's…

So you take a BSDL codebase, fork it, close it, make proprietary changes, profiting from the BSDL codebase, then slap the PG community in the face by open sourcing it under a more restrictive license hoping to benefit from the community you just slapped in the face but restricting competition. They are of course free to release their code under any license they wish. I just think releasing code under the *GPL when yo…

If the pg community did not intend their database to be used that way, they would've chosen a copyleft license. Have you considered that this is part of their intention?

Would CitusDB have been created at all were it not because they could sell a propietary fork as they have been doing in the past?

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