An update to the Timescale license
blog.timescale.com
An update to the Timescale license
1–10 of 210 posts
Re: An update to the Timescale license
#2It would seem these folks listened to the criticism of their Timescale License here on HN and took it to heart. Right to repair, right to improve, and the gating of enterprise features were the only serious criticisms, and they've been addressed. I tip my metaphorical hat to them.
I'm curious to see if some vocal people here will still not be satisfied with anything short of a OSI-approved FOSS license. Really the only practical limitation that I can see now is if you're AWS you can't launch a competing service with Timescale by leeching off their software without paying for it. That's a glaring short-coming of FOSS licenses that really should be addressed. Until then I expect this kind of almost-FOSS license to become more popular in the future. We're seeing it from many of the recently founded open-source companies in the cloud era.
Re: An update to the Timescale license
#3It would seem these folks listened to the criticism of their Timescale License here on HN and took it to heart. Right to repair, right to improve, and the gating of enterprise features were the only serious criticisms, and they've been addressed. I tip my metaphorical hat to them. I'm curious to see if some vocal people here will still not be satisfied with anything short of a OSI-approved FOSS license. Really the on…
And not to mention profiting off of the patches and fixes the maintainers provide and almost never contributing back. I am definitely happy to see attempts to help the creators.
Re: An update to the Timescale license
#4It would seem these folks listened to the criticism of their Timescale License here on HN and took it to heart. Right to repair, right to improve, and the gating of enterprise features were the only serious criticisms, and they've been addressed. I tip my metaphorical hat to them. I'm curious to see if some vocal people here will still not be satisfied with anything short of a OSI-approved FOSS license. Really the on…
Its kind of tricky, in terms of the license how do you end up with that practical limitation? IE how do you distinguish a company thats "too big" (like amazon) to be likely to just be predatorially taking advantage of OSS, vs others.
Re: An update to the Timescale license
#5It would seem these folks listened to the criticism of their Timescale License here on HN and took it to heart. Right to repair, right to improve, and the gating of enterprise features were the only serious criticisms, and they've been addressed. I tip my metaphorical hat to them. I'm curious to see if some vocal people here will still not be satisfied with anything short of a OSI-approved FOSS license. Really the on…
Hopefully the CockroachDB folks are reading this too. The features set behind the enterprise only license seem arbitrary
Re: An update to the Timescale license
#6It would seem these folks listened to the criticism of their Timescale License here on HN and took it to heart. Right to repair, right to improve, and the gating of enterprise features were the only serious criticisms, and they've been addressed. I tip my metaphorical hat to them. I'm curious to see if some vocal people here will still not be satisfied with anything short of a OSI-approved FOSS license. Really the on…
This is certainly a great improvement in the license! Kudos to TimescaleDB.
I wonder if the new license allows us to offer services on top of TimescaleDB in a multi-tenant setting. GitLab.com has metric monitoring https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/operations/metrics/ and we're considering using TimescaleDB to store these. We would not offer direct access to the database.
The relevant section in the license https://www.timescale.com/legal/licenses seems to be the prohibition to "provide any form of software-as-a-service or service offering in which the TSL Licensed Software is offered or made available to third parties to provide time-series database functions or operations, other than as part of Your Value Added Products or Services".
I'm not sure if metrics count as time-series database functions or operations.
Re: An update to the Timescale license
#7It would seem these folks listened to the criticism of their Timescale License here on HN and took it to heart. Right to repair, right to improve, and the gating of enterprise features were the only serious criticisms, and they've been addressed. I tip my metaphorical hat to them. I'm curious to see if some vocal people here will still not be satisfied with anything short of a OSI-approved FOSS license. Really the on…
Its kind of tricky, in terms of the license how do you end up with that practical limitation? IE how do you distinguish a company thats "too big" (like amazon) to be likely to just be predatorially taking advantage of OSS, vs others.
Many new open source companies, like Timescale, Cockroach Labs are going with a managed cloud service offering as their business model. Even RethinkDB pivoted in that direction, although too late in the game for them to survive. So one could make an open-source license specifically reserving that freedom for the creators only.
There are probably other business models one could try to protect. The basic idea I think is give as much freedom as possible while also providing some protection for specific use cases that allow the creators to be compensated for their work. It benefits nobody if you create a wild west of freedoms that deny creators a way to finance their work.
Re: An update to the Timescale license
#8It would seem these folks listened to the criticism of their Timescale License here on HN and took it to heart. Right to repair, right to improve, and the gating of enterprise features were the only serious criticisms, and they've been addressed. I tip my metaphorical hat to them. I'm curious to see if some vocal people here will still not be satisfied with anything short of a OSI-approved FOSS license. Really the on…
Its kind of tricky, in terms of the license how do you end up with that practical limitation? IE how do you distinguish a company thats "too big" (like amazon) to be likely to just be predatorially taking advantage of OSS, vs others.
Thanks for question.
One of the things that Timescale License does (similar with Elastic, Confluent Community, etc.) is to define a "Value Added Service", and basically say you can utilize/distribute the database as part of a SaaS service or product provided that it's a Value Added Service/Product, and basically just isn't offering the (in our case) "TimescaleDB-as-a-Service".
Then it becomes a bit of reading the actual definition in the license. In our case:
https://www.timescale.com/legal/licenses#section-3-10-value-...
Unlike the other licenses, we tried to couch part of this definition is specific details that engineers could understand, e.g.
"(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."
So basically one important test would be: if your SaaS service is defining the data schema, indexes, etc., all good. If your users have arbitrary DDL access to the database and do this all themselves, that would "classify" as a "database-as-a-service" offering under this definition.
Re: An update to the Timescale license
#9It would seem these folks listened to the criticism of their Timescale License here on HN and took it to heart. Right to repair, right to improve, and the gating of enterprise features were the only serious criticisms, and they've been addressed. I tip my metaphorical hat to them. I'm curious to see if some vocal people here will still not be satisfied with anything short of a OSI-approved FOSS license. Really the on…
This is certainly a great improvement in the license! Kudos to TimescaleDB. I wonder if the new license allows us to offer services on top of TimescaleDB in a multi-tenant setting. GitLab.com has metric monitoring https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/operations/metrics/ and we're considering using TimescaleDB to store these. We would not offer direct access to the database. The relevant section in the license https://www.times…
I posted below, but an important check really is the definition of the "Value Added Product or Service".
https://www.timescale.com/legal/licenses#section-3-10-value-...
On its face, it sounds like your use case is totally allowed under the TSL (and in fact, since the TSL was initially launched in Dec 2018). We have plenty of users who build commercially-available monitoring products/services on top of TimescaleDB.
Happy to help if you'd like - our engineers are always available in our Slack Channel: https://slack.timescale.com/
UPDATED: Ha! I didn't realize I was responding to the CEO of GitLab. =)
Re: An update to the Timescale license
#10While this looks like the end of arbitrary enterprise tiers, when I look around to me it looks like the other database providers saw Snowflake execute "cloud" brilliantly, and now everyone is trying to emulate that.
Turns out the need to keep your data on prem has been greatly exaggerated, and most companies would rather pay a single cloud bill than paying for more machines and FTEs to handle another product.