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An update to the Timescale license

blog.timescale.com

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Re: An update to the Timescale license

#51

Post by hodgesrm »

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…

> I'm curious to see if some vocal people here will still not be satisfied with anything short of a OSI-approved FOSS license.

Don't forget that Timescale can alter the terms of their license at any time. That's the material difference from an OSI-approved license.

Here's the relevant term of the TSL Agreement. Emphasis mine:

> (c) Distribution of Source Code or Binaries in Standalone Form. Subject to the prohibitions in Section 2.2 below, a license to copy and distribute the Timescale Software source code and binaries solely in unmodified standalone form and subject to the terms and conditions of the most current version of this TSL Agreement.

Re: An update to the Timescale license

#52

Post by skrebbel »

mfreed wrote: post #32
jordz wrote: post #28

Hey! Maybe mfreed could answer this but how does this affect users of Timescale as part of Azure's Managed Posgres service, is this something that will still continue to be available?

Azure Postgres offers the Apache-2 Edition of TimescaleDB, not the Community Edition (which the TSL applies to). Same with DigitalOcean, Rackspace, Scaleways, Alibaba, etc. So they can continue to offer the Apache-2 Edition, but could not before, and still can't, offer the Community Edition. Community is where a lot of our more advanced features lie: multi-node, columnar compression, continuous and real-time aggregat…

fwiw, I've spent 10 minutes scouring the timescale.com but I can't find any information about the difference between the Apache-2 Edition or the Community edition. Links from your GitHub readme suggest that such information used to be there, but now it's all "cloud" vs "software" - if I choose "software", which of the two editions do I get?

I assume this is still a WIP since the recent licensing / business model changes likely also warranted website changes, hence my feedback.

Congrats on the move btw, and fantastic that Timescale Cloud is working so well as a business model. Are you considering adding other clouds? I ask for selfish reasons as we're currently on Digital Ocean and quite happily so. If Timescale Cloud would exist for DO we'd likely become a customer.

In fact, if your business model succeeds and gets adopted by other open source vendors, supporting a wide range of clouds and hosting providers might very well help directly undermine the current effective oligopoly that is AWS/GCP/Azure! That'd be just splendid. Sorry for rambling a bit :-)

Re: An update to the Timescale license

#53

Post by akulkarni »

hodgesrm wrote: post #51
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…

> I'm curious to see if some vocal people here will still not be satisfied with anything short of a OSI-approved FOSS license. Don't forget that Timescale can alter the terms of their license at any time. That's the material difference from an OSI-approved license. Here's the relevant term of the TSL Agreement. Emphasis mine: > (c) Distribution of Source Code or Binaries in Standalone Form. Subject to the prohibition…

Not really. Modifications only apply to next versions, doesn't change to prior versions:

  The modified agreement shall govern any new version of the TSL Licensed Software
  (and all its constituent source code and binaries) that is officially released as
  a complete version release by Timescale on or after such Posted Date.
https://www.timescale.com/legal/licenses#section-7-2-modific...

Re: An update to the Timescale license

#54

Post by jjjensen90 »

mfreed wrote: post #20
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-…

I've commented on it before, but I have to say again, the Timescale Helm charts are by far the best way I've ever seen a database run in Kubernetes, and actually from an operations, backup, and scaling perspective they are the best database management experience I've had period. Huge fan, always enjoy talking with Feike, and keep up the great work Timescale team.

Re: An update to the Timescale license

#55

Post by akulkarni »

skrebbel wrote: post #50

> What we have preserved, however, is the main restriction preventing other companies from offering TimescaleDB-as-a-Service in the cloud. I wonder how this ties in to eg Digital Ocean's managed Postgres product. According to their docs[0] I can just `CREATE EXTENSION timescaledb` on a managed postgres instance and I'm done. Isn't that totally breaking the TSL? And if not, what's preventing AWS and friends from doing…

The version available in Digital Ocean's managed Postgres product is the Apache-2 edition of TimescaleDB. It doesn't included advanced capabilities like native compression, multi-node, continuous aggregations, etc.

Re: An update to the Timescale license

#56

Post by ramses0 »

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…

https://people.debian.org/~bap/dfsg-faq.html

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Free_Software_Definition#T...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debian_Free_Software_Guideline...

The litmus test has always been: "while you may not want your software used in a weapon of mass destruction (or other purpose you don't agree with), it is not free software / open source unless it can be used for that purpose" ... those are items #5 and #6 in the DFSG guidelines.

While Mr. Torvalds may have been a much richer man if he prohibited "Linux as a Service", it was the unrestricted freedom given by the GPL which allowed companies like Amazon/AWS to use Linux in the first place.

Re: An update to the Timescale license

#57

Post by fastball »

mindcrime wrote: post #45
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…

I'm curious to see if some vocal people here will still not be satisfied with anything short of a OSI-approved FOSS license. I don't have a dog in this fight, so to speak, as I'm not a user of Timescale. All I'll say is that I hate to see license proliferation in general, and I don't think people should refer to things as "Open Source" if they aren't using an OSI compliant license. To me, if I see a project that's us…

> because I don't know what the license permits

That's why you read it...

Re: An update to the Timescale license

#58

Post by akulkarni »

lima wrote: post #49
yamrzou wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Another side question, please. How does TimescaleDB compare to Clickhouse? Since you mentioned compression, I've been using Clickhouse to store bitemporal data, and have been amazed by its speed and compression levels. Unfortunately it's lacking in terms of relational modeling. Would I get the best of two worlds with TimescaleDB? What are the tradeoffs?

Compression and aggregation performance in TimescaleDB is much worse than ClickHouse - it represents a different tradeoff, you trade relational features for raw speed. TimescaleDB is basically (very) fancy PostgreSQL sharding and row-oriented, while ClickHouse is a column store. Depending on what you need to do, ClickHouse dictionaries and JOINs might be good enough.

> Compression and aggregation performance in TimescaleDB is much worse than ClickHouse

You are likely basing this off on an old version of TimescaleDB.

For the last year TimescaleDB has included native compression (in part by storing data in a columnar format):

https://blog.timescale.com/blog/building-columnar-compressio...

TimescaleDB now implements delta-delta, Gorilla, and other best-in-class compression algorithms:

https://blog.timescale.com/blog/time-series-compression-algo...

This has yielded 94%+ compression, which should make TimescaleDB and Clickhouse fairly similar in storage compression.

Re: An update to the Timescale license

#59

Post by ComputerGuru »

sandstrom wrote: post #18
gigatexal wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

They don’t have incremental backups. You are of course able to dump the tables, and it’s fully compatible with postgresql export utilities.

Re: An update to the Timescale license

#60

Post by shay_ker »

You gotta hand it to them - Mike & Ajay are fantastic at writing blog posts. Either it's all them, or they have someone helping them, but either way the content is really top-notch.

Seems like table-stakes for anyone including the dev community when building databases these days.

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