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Rich Hickey on Datomic (2012) [video]

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Re: Rich Hickey on Datomic (2012) [video]

#21

Post by piokoch »

hirundo wrote: post #3

I love Datomic, think it can be revolutionary and use it in my side projects. I understand their need to make a living off of their (brilliant, unique) labor and so keep it closed source. But the big bananas at my company are reluctant to try something so different. With Clojure I can push them over that hump since it's open source. But they are not willing to introduce proprietary lock-in of such a fundamental piece…

Opensourcing sounds good. The problem is the right license choice. If they use something like Apache/LGPL "business friendly" license then soon or later Amazon will take the product, pack it into its cloud offering and Datomic will get nothing (MongoDB case). Maybe dual license GPL 3 or AGPL plus commercial would work, the question is how it would affect their business. Maybe if they are doing well with current model there is not incentive to change anything.

Re: Rich Hickey on Datomic (2012) [video]

#22

Post by dkersten »

hirundo wrote: post #3

I love Datomic, think it can be revolutionary and use it in my side projects. I understand their need to make a living off of their (brilliant, unique) labor and so keep it closed source. But the big bananas at my company are reluctant to try something so different. With Clojure I can push them over that hump since it's open source. But they are not willing to introduce proprietary lock-in of such a fundamental piece…

I'm a big fan of Rich's work and I like (the idea of) Datomic a lot and while I don't begrudge their decision to keep it closed source, I personally won't use a database that isn't open source. Its simply too important a piece of any modern software and having only one company that can make fixes or changes if you need something is too risky for my taste. My priorities won't always align with Cognitect's, but if they're the only ones that can provide support, fixes or features then that is too much risk for me.

Having said that, I don't know what the solution is. A Red Hat model would be great, but how many companies have managed to replicate that success? The usual "commercial gives you these extra features" model means you need non-critical but nice-to-have features that people want to pay for but that doesn't cripple the open source version, not exactly ideal either. Having paid support and consulting as the primary income seems difficult too (eg RethinkDB). So, perhaps keeping it closed is the best route for them, I just wish there were better options. Oh well, I still get to enjoy the majority of Rich & team's work, so I'm not complaining.

> If Ions is successful enough that could be their profit source, allowing them to set standalone Datomic free.

That would be a great future.

Re: Rich Hickey on Datomic (2012) [video]

#23

Post by pgt »

Scarbutt wrote: post #8
abc_lisper wrote: post #6

I love Clojure and like Datomic, but that thing needs some documentation. Really good documentation. I think that is one of the main reasons why it didn't achieve much penetration for something so good. Be different if you must, but document. Look at something like Kafka, where every little thing is documented. You can find documentation for every shell script! that ships with it, not to mention excellent api docs. T…

Having great documentation would mean less sales in support contracts.

I upvoted to counter because the morally hazardous incentive does exist with proprietary tech that you become super dependent on. This risk may not apply to the founders (Rich, who we all love), but to a future acquisitor like Oracle, IBM or AWS.

I predict that AWS will buy Cognitect. I think they are aiming for that exit and is part of why Datomic Cloud is so closely integrated with DynamoDB and other AWS services.

Re: Rich Hickey on Datomic (2012) [video]

#24

Post by okramcivokram »

piokoch wrote: post #21
hirundo wrote: post #3

I love Datomic, think it can be revolutionary and use it in my side projects. I understand their need to make a living off of their (brilliant, unique) labor and so keep it closed source. But the big bananas at my company are reluctant to try something so different. With Clojure I can push them over that hump since it's open source. But they are not willing to introduce proprietary lock-in of such a fundamental piece…

Opensourcing sounds good. The problem is the right license choice. If they use something like Apache/LGPL "business friendly" license then soon or later Amazon will take the product, pack it into its cloud offering and Datomic will get nothing (MongoDB case). Maybe dual license GPL 3 or AGPL plus commercial would work, the question is how it would affect their business. Maybe if they are doing well with current model…

I think if it ever happens it'll be Eclipse Public License 1.0 like everything else clojure.

Re: Rich Hickey on Datomic (2012) [video]

#26

Post by mping »

hirundo wrote: post #3

I love Datomic, think it can be revolutionary and use it in my side projects. I understand their need to make a living off of their (brilliant, unique) labor and so keep it closed source. But the big bananas at my company are reluctant to try something so different. With Clojure I can push them over that hump since it's open source. But they are not willing to introduce proprietary lock-in of such a fundamental piece…

I wonder how hard it would be to adapt eg: postgres to keep history around forever. There's temporal tables in ANSI SQL 2011, but I think the semantics are different (it's per table, I believe).

As much as I like datomic, I'd prefer an implementation in a lower level language. However, I'm pretty sure there are alot of clojure experts out there pushing datomic to its limits.

Re: Rich Hickey on Datomic (2012) [video]

#27

Post by TurboHaskal »

hirundo wrote: post #3

I love Datomic, think it can be revolutionary and use it in my side projects. I understand their need to make a living off of their (brilliant, unique) labor and so keep it closed source. But the big bananas at my company are reluctant to try something so different. With Clojure I can push them over that hump since it's open source. But they are not willing to introduce proprietary lock-in of such a fundamental piece…

In my experience, companies don't care about introducing proprietary lock-in. They do it all the time with services and infrastructure. It's all excuses. They just don't want to pay for software.

Re: Rich Hickey on Datomic (2012) [video]

#28

Post by icebraining »

busterarm wrote: post #16
jdminhbg wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's kind of incredible how, over the course of two decades, being open source went from making something radioactive to business clients to being a requirement. I've seen it over and over again.

It's still radioactive, just to a different group of people now and weaponized (see Mongo, Elastic, et al). I also think GPL compliance is a looming major problem for organizations and most haven't realized it yet. We have seen a few folks try to monetize GPL compliance the last few years...netfilter, I'm looking at you. And this is why many of us prefer open source software to free software.

You mean you prefer permissive over copyleft. Most open source licenses are free software and vice-versa.

Re: Rich Hickey on Datomic (2012) [video]

#29

Post by anentropic »

erikpukinskis wrote: post #17
awinter-py wrote: post #15

have always wondered why this didn't succeed on a larger scale Maybe in a v0 release, most applications can get away with created & modified fields. Maybe the storage overhead of immutability scares people for some applications. Maybe datomic is something that should be part of a powerful DB plugins ecosystem rather than its own database, or as an external audit log that can be written separately while keeping your m…

It seems to me that you need to be all-in on Datomic to get value from it. So that knocks out anyone working with a legacy system. You also can’t really hire Datomic people in bulk so that knocks out anyone trying to scale their eng org. I can see it working well for companies who are trying to do a lot with a small very bright staff, but that’s a small category. And even then it would only be places where the staff…

> Maybe for a product where you need rewind everywhere.

> Maybe for a product where you need extreme auditability.

These are "nice to have"s or "wish I had it but it's too late now"s for a lot of products though

Re: Rich Hickey on Datomic (2012) [video]

#30

Post by cpach »

TurboHaskal wrote: post #27
hirundo wrote: post #3

I love Datomic, think it can be revolutionary and use it in my side projects. I understand their need to make a living off of their (brilliant, unique) labor and so keep it closed source. But the big bananas at my company are reluctant to try something so different. With Clojure I can push them over that hump since it's open source. But they are not willing to introduce proprietary lock-in of such a fundamental piece…

In my experience, companies don't care about introducing proprietary lock-in. They do it all the time with services and infrastructure. It's all excuses. They just don't want to pay for software.

Lot’s of companies pay for software. E.g. Windows Server and SQL Server.
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