Multi-node TimescaleDB is now free

Here is a doc on using TimescaleDB as a horizontally-scalable, easy-to-deploy, operationally-mature data store for Prometheus data (i.e., metrics), put together by another of our engineering teams:

Building an open-source analytical platform for Prometheus

https://tsdb.co/prom-design-doc

I'm also happy to discuss privately if you'd prefer - ajay (at) timescale.com.

The argument of go 100% FOSS or not reminds me of the argument of free market vs regulation. Yes a free market sounds ideal, but in practice, a few major players take advantage and everyone who isn't them is left out in the cold.

The same applies to FOSS vs Proprietary software. If everyone did FOSS to the fullest extent, and anyone building products on FOSS made their product 100% FOSS, then it wouldn't be nearly as big a deal if Amazon took TimescaleDB and sold it, because anything they did would be available to everyone else.

But that isn't how it works. They just wait until a market establishes itself and swoop in and do something someone else is already doing successfully, but better by using their massive resources behind it. Honestly it's a lot like embrace, extend, extinguish. I'm not saying this to shit on Amazon, I don't necessarily think it's intentionally malicious, it just often ends up hurting a lot of organizations building FOSS.

I think of it this way: A lot of people agree that tech giants are increasingly becoming more powerful as they expand their reach, often due to their ability to simply buy or kill the competition through undercutting with their massive cash stockpiles accumulated through their primary business.

For FOSS, it is the same strategy except the competition isn't being "bought", it's simply being taken (FOSS) and made into something "better" with their nearly unlimited resources, and then undercutting the original proprietors.

In fact, when we were looking at Timescale licensing, we took careful look at what a lot of other like company licenses did here (Confluent, Redis, etc), and what later became the Polyform License. Most of them left this definition pretty vague -- because frankly, legal language is never as precise (and perhaps shouldn't be) as what an engineer may like.

We went a step further, and tried to define this more precisely about what it means to "offer" TimescaleDB:

      (iii) users of such Value Added Products or Services are prohibited,
      either contractually or technically, from defining, redefining, or
      modifying the database schema or other structural aspects of database
      objects, such as through use of the Timescale Data Definition Interfaces,
      in a Timescale Database utilized by such Value Added Products or
      Services.

What that means is that if you've defined the Heap schema, you have built the indexes and tables, and then are offering a SaaS product on this, you're fine:

- You are offering a product/marketing SaaS service around usage/product analytics, not a time-series-database-as-a-service

- You are not approaching the market and saying, "Here's how to get TimescaleDB-as-a-service" (unlike, say, Managed TimescaleDB running on Rackspace or Digital Ocean), you are saying "Here's a full Product/Marketing Analytics Solution".

- You are not giving your users direct/psql access to the raw database to define their tables/schemas/indexes and otherwise just treat that service as a hosted TimescaleDB instance.

I hope that helps!

I have seen so many distributed data storages fail in a multitude of ways that i just dont trust anyone anymore. After 2-3 years they may have ironed out most bugs and i can evaluate again whether i do trust their implementation to store my data safely.

[1]https://aws.amazon.com/timestream/