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An update to the Timescale license

blog.timescale.com

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Re: An update to the Timescale license

#11

Post by foobiekr »

gigatexal wrote: post #5
slashdev wrote: post #2

It 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

These are never arbitrary. They are almost always the result of a lot of internal discussions the outcome of which no one is really happy with.

Re: An update to the Timescale license

#12

Post by btown »

sytse wrote: post #6
slashdev wrote: post #2

It 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…

Also not a lawyer but it appears the bar is that "(2) the customer is 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."

For Timescale this may not be as relevant, but I do wonder how a license like this would be applicable to systems like Salesforce, which allows you to define a schema of custom fields, or for someone using an Entity-Attribute-Value type of schema. What is a database operation - is summing over a dimension a database operation? Where does data end and schema begin? These licenses are entering uncharted territory.

Re: An update to the Timescale license

#13

Post by znpy »

sytse wrote: post #6
slashdev wrote: post #2

It 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 think that your use-case would be fine.

Most people don't seem to realize that the idea behind this kind of legalese is to prevent companies like amazon from offering something like "elastic timescaledb" which is mostly an operated timescale service, eating TimescaleDB's (the company) revenue stream. Or similar things happening in either Google cloud or Microsoft Azure.

I can't really blame for that.

Re: An update to the Timescale license

#14

Post by znpy »

nemothekid wrote: post #10

While 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.

I wouldn't look at it that way.

A company running on premises probably has a mindset that is okay with dealing with all the things related. And it probably operates at a scale where it can save a lot by not moving to the cloud. This is often jut not understood by a lot of people.

A company embracing the cloud doesn't want to do that and is just interested in services. They don't want hosts, they want service endpoints.

There are a lot of developer-centric companies for which operations and operational work is definitely not a core of the business, and have no interest in getting operational work and know-how in house.

Re: An update to the Timescale license

#15

Post by GordonS »

slashdev wrote: post #2

It 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…

Yep, they even quoted some recent HN comments in the article.

I have absolutely no doubt that a small but vocal minority will remain unsatisfied. I'm not surprised by this move, as there was barely anything left in the Enterprise license anyway. Personally, I think this is a great move, and one that should in theory leave that vocal minority with very little to actually grumble about.

Re: An update to the Timescale license

#16

Post by Netcob »

slashdev wrote: post #2

It 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…

Maybe that's just the natural progression for technologies that are dependencies of other technologies. As a software business you don't want to depend on too many pieces of software (or hardware) that you have little to no control over. Linux is the best example of a solution for that problem - even the tech giants won't bother making their own OS anymore if there is already one out there that they can use and modify. And ISAs (RISC-V) will probably follow that route too.

What's interesting though is that businesses seem to be unable to initiate that progress on their own. You need those vocal FOSS people for that, who will tirelessly drag technology towards an ideal we'll never reach... but nobody else will get the ball rolling. FOSS as the basis for entire ecosystems of businesses that would have never existed without it makes total sense, but no business will create it out of thin air. I think this gradual opening up like with TimescaleDB is simply an effect of the wind blowing in that direction. Few will be going full speed, but nobody wants to be left behind.

Re: An update to the Timescale license

#18

Post by sandstrom »

gigatexal wrote: post #5
slashdev wrote: post #2

It 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

Agree, they don't even have backups in the non-enterprise license.

Re: An update to the Timescale license

#20

Post by mfreed »

mosselman wrote: post #17

I am probably wrong, as often is the case, but I seem to remember that High availability used to be in the enterprise tier. Now it is missing from the “software tier”. What am I missing? Is HA now free or not?

TimescaleDB (single-node) leverages Postgres features for HA (physical replication). It was never in the "enterprise tier", it fully works with the pure Apache 2 version.

We also make available k8s helm charts that make it super easy to setup replicated clusters, including with mechanisms (Patroni) for automated failure detection and failover, and continuous incremental backup. That's also available under the Apache-2 license:

https://github.com/timescale/timescaledb-kubernetes

(There used to be some slightly confusing language in our product page that perhaps led to some of your confusion, and apologies for that.)

For multi-node (available starting in TimescaleDB 2.0), we are working on more native mechanisms for replication. But as announced earlier, these will all be "community" features (free) under our Timescale License.

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