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An update to the Timescale license

blog.timescale.com

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Re: An update to the Timescale license

#131

Post by stavros »

StopHammoTime wrote: post #128
stavros wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you elaborate? What collaboration do you mean?

Uhh, kubernetes would be an immediate example. A massive piece of software that has been adapted into every major cloud provider, with all those cloud providers working on that same piece of software. While Google may have done it to make their own Cloud offering better, it ultimately has succeeded in saturating the container compute market and with their own success has brought plenty of competition.

On the contrary, Google made Kubernetes precisely so they could commoditize every other cloud provider and then offer the strongest Kubernetes provider there is. When AWS is just a layer under Kubernetes, you can move your entire infrastructure to GCP by pushing your Kubernetes config to a different endpoint.

They succeeded quite well in that.

Re: An update to the Timescale license

#132

Post by akulkarni »

shay_ker wrote: post #60

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.

Aw yes, thank you :)

We do write these posts (and as other folks at Timescale will attest, we are also notoriously picky editors for other peoples' posts)

We've been writing together for a long-time. One of my favorite memories at MIT was working on a joint 6.033 paper with Mike 20 years ago (some of you will know what I'm talking about).

Probably lost to the early Internet dustbin tho :)

UPDATE: I found it! http://www.scs.stanford.edu/~mfreed/docs/6.033/smartcard.pdf

Re: An update to the Timescale license

#133

Post by jeffffff »

rectang wrote: post #119
stavros wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would tend to agree. Saying "our software is free for anyone to do anything they want with, except Amazon to profit from" may not be free in letter, but I certainly see it free in spirit. I fear we're letting perfect be the enemy of the good here, and letting the FOSS ecosystem wither and lose incalculable value by letting trillion-dollar corporations exploit the hard work of people for free. If the choice is betwe…

> Saying "our software is free for anyone to do anything they want with, except Amazon to profit from" may not be free in letter, but I certainly see it free in spirit. Some people feel just as strongly about imposing field-of-use restrictions to exclude military entities as you do about excluding "trillion dollar companies". Others feel strongly about excluding all commerical usage. But "Open Source" means no field-…

by that argument copyleft licenses aren't open source either? from a practical perspective this license is strictly more permissive than AGPL in that it only excludes cloud companies rather than all non-OSS companies.

Re: An update to the Timescale license

#134

Post by mfreed »

akulkarni wrote: post #132
shay_ker wrote: post #60

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.

Aw yes, thank you :) We do write these posts (and as other folks at Timescale will attest, we are also notoriously picky editors for other peoples' posts) We've been writing together for a long-time. One of my favorite memories at MIT was working on a joint 6.033 paper with Mike 20 years ago (some of you will know what I'm talking about). Probably lost to the early Internet dustbin tho :) UPDATE: I found it! http://w…

Oof. Making undergrad course project reports available for the world to see! ;)

The third member of that team has also built some pretty cool technology -- maybe behind some of the music you're listening to right now:

https://www.izotope.com/

Re: An update to the Timescale license

#135

Post by tormeh »

cercatrova wrote: post #125
lillecarl wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem with agpl is that no companies want to touch it. It's too restrictive if you ever want to integrate something with your internal proprietary moneymaking code.

Doesn't that accomplish the goal then? Make your project AGPL and with a commercial license, so only you will be able to make it a commercial business as other big cloud companies don't want to touch it.

The problem is that it is not truly impossible to integrate into a commercial company. It's more that the license practically requires a lawyer to look at exactly how it'll be used and approve that use. AWS certainly does not shy away from hosting AGPL software. It does prevent AWS from taking the code and running with it though, at least not without a shim. A more permissive license can lead to the Athena/Presto situation where Athena is, to my knowledge, a proprietary fork of Presto.

Re: An update to the Timescale license

#136

Post by analognoise »

cycloptic wrote: post #114
StavrosK wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you give me a couch for free but I have to bring a truck to take it away on, does that make it not-free?

If you had to pay to rent a truck and also pay to hire workers to move it in and out of the truck and then up 10 floors to your apartment, then yes, it wasn't free, there is a real cost to you. A cost that you saved me because I didn't have to pay someone to take it to the landfill. So I would actually be saving money despite that it looks like I gave it to you "for free". And if I was really crafty I'd have suggeste…

Open Source - Choosy Beggars.

Re: An update to the Timescale license

#137

Post by sytse »

mfreed wrote: post #9
sytse wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. Ha…

Thanks for the clarification, glad to hear it is allowed.

Re: An update to the Timescale license

#138

Post by cycloptic »

mfreed wrote: post #130
cycloptic wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know, I get that, but long-term this seems like non-solution that won't actually do anything. It just ties it to their service offering instead of Amazon's. If they decide to sell out to Amazon eventually they'll probably be able to bid the price higher. That's good for them, and if their customers are fine with it, then that's good for them too, but let's not pretend it's something more. I know in current times I…

where the authors are hiding the implementation from public scrutiny We agree that such visibility is a good thing! All of our source code (both Apache-2 and TSL) has always been public on github: https://github.com/timescale/timescaledb

Sorry I should have been more clear. It appears you still do that because it's the bare minimum you need to do to keep customers from leaving for Amazon. But if that's where you stop then I can't see how it's solving the problem.

Re: An update to the Timescale license

#139

Post by cycloptic »

analognoise wrote: post #136
cycloptic wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you had to pay to rent a truck and also pay to hire workers to move it in and out of the truck and then up 10 floors to your apartment, then yes, it wasn't free, there is a real cost to you. A cost that you saved me because I didn't have to pay someone to take it to the landfill. So I would actually be saving money despite that it looks like I gave it to you "for free". And if I was really crafty I'd have suggeste…

Open Source - Choosy Beggars.

Yes, that's definitely the cynical way to look at it :)

Re: An update to the Timescale license

#140

Post by OJFord »

rectang wrote: post #78
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 problem with the terms of their license. Use whatever license you want — just don't call it "open source" ! From the blog post... This is problematic: > open-source in spirit It ain't. It is firmly in the spirit of "source available" licenses, which have a decades-long history…

> > open-source in spirit

> It ain't. It is firmly in the spirit of "source available" licenses

Let's put a few more of the OP's words around that:

> a source-available license that was open-source in spirit, but

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