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Aerospike goes Open Source

aerospike.com

31–40 of 86 posts

Re: Aerospike goes Open Source

#31
post #3

The APGL license caught my eyes. Does anyone take this license into account (deciding between an Apache/MIT/BSD DB vs APGL DB) when they use it in their service / software stack. For example, this openstack thread always keeps me alert using APGL when I am developing a solution. http://lists.openstack.org/pipermail/openstack-dev/2014-Marc... and here is MongoDB's FAQ explaining APGL in plain English: http://blog.mong…

Where I work[1], AGPL software is strictly and unconditionally forbidden to use for anything, even things that are completely internal and will never see a public user. The fear that our lawyers have is that, since putting up the software in a service counts as a derived work, our whole software stack (including the stuff we don't open source) will have to be opened along with it. There have to be clear service bound…

That's often not an unwelcome side-effect. If you're at a large technology company, making sure companies like yours don't use the free version is a common motivation. Aerospike sells a commercial enterprise license; in that kind of a "dual-license" setup, the GPL/AGPL can function as a useful poison pill to keep from cannibalizing enterprise sales with the free version (where a common alternative would be to just not open-source at all, for fear of that cannibalization).

Re: Aerospike goes Open Source

#32
post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The core code is written in C, but they're definitely using Lua in places, I believe they've incorporated some code from AlchemyDB... https://code.google.com/p/alchemydatabase/ From what I've read it could easily surpass Mongo, just look at the cost savings... http://www.datanami.com/2013/09/06/aerospike_says_secret_to_... "The second comparison (a video ad serving platform) had much bigger requirements, including a…

"just look at the cost savings" Purported cost savings.

There's an article from an AppLovin (RTB ad-network) engineer (http://liviutudor.com/2014/07/24/of-advertising-and-scaling-...) talking about how Aerospike DB is essential to their serving up 15B (as in billion) ad impressions per-day.

Re: Aerospike goes Open Source

#33
post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AGPL is essentially the "corporate coward" license. They want to capture all of your private changes to basically get free (legally mandated, zero "community good will") development resources. Companies think it's "safer" than BSD or straight up GPL because lawyers feel "omgz, source codes, zero cost IP copies, instant competition!" The next step after AGPL will probably be BrainGPL requiring you to publish all thoug…

You could just pay for a license if you're that paranoid. It's remarkable to what extent people will complain about free not being "free enough". I assume you haven't contributed a line of code to the project, so it's a bit presumptuous to knock it.

> I assume you haven't contributed a line of code to the project, so it's a bit presumptuous to knock it.

It's not that simple. Even if you're a company that wants to use the software and contribute changes upstream, it's still a dumb idea to use AGPL software.

Because of the loose definition of what constitutes a derived work, modifying AGPL software (even if you put those modifications upstream) means you might have to open source your entire software stack. The AGPL is not like the LGPL, it doesn't contain any exceptions for linking against it in an overall product. Unless you have clear service boundaries, you are creating a derived work every time you use AGPL software in a service.

In my company, our lawyers outright forbid the use of AGPL software altogether for this reason. Even software that's only used internally. As _delirium mentioned above[1], that's not entirely an unwanted thing from the licenser's perspective: they typically do this so you'll buy their commercial license. But don't assume the only people who don't like AGPL are non-contributing freeloaders.

We submit tons of stuff upstream on a regular basis at my company, but we simply can't do it with AGPL software. Seeing any reference at all that our company (which has some of the deepest pockets in the planet) uses AGPL software anywhere in its stack will open ourselves up to lawsuits immediately. So we just don't touch it, ever.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8095024

Re: Aerospike goes Open Source

#34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's interesting, thank you. In practical terms, what does ACID provide that compare and set does not?

The page linked goes into more detail, but among other things, Compare and Set operations are only concerning one data element at a time - meaning you cannot do Atomic updates to multiple keys. The ability to do multiple key updates atomically makes it possible to build higher level abstractions by reliably combining data from multiple keys under concurrent workloads. Basically, transactions that can span an arbitrar…

Yes, I really hate this. When I first saw that Aerospike support ACID transaction, I thought, Wow, it is really amazing. After I read the paper, That "ACID" means one key transaction, it make me dispoint, I don't even want to see there code again..

Re: Aerospike goes Open Source

#36
Aerospike guys were at a big data workshop at Bangalore last week. It's performance is pretty impressive. They claimed about >1M TPS with just 3 nodes and compared it with Couchdb which is claimed to achieve 1M TPS in 330 nodes. But unclear about their benchmarking method.

Re: Aerospike goes Open Source

#37
post #35

I don't think this press release has nearly enough buzzwords.

Yep. Everything about Aerospike so far have been filled with buzzwords. There was a flash talk by an employee of theirs recently at a conference in Bangalore and it was just marketing BS. I'm still skeptical.

Re: Aerospike goes Open Source

#38

Aerospike guys were at a big data workshop at Bangalore last week. It's performance is pretty impressive. They claimed about >1M TPS with just 3 nodes and compared it with Couchdb which is claimed to achieve 1M TPS in 330 nodes. But unclear about their benchmarking method.

Fifth Elephant - https://fifthelephant.in/2014/

Re: Aerospike goes Open Source

#40
If the server uses the AGPL instead of the GPL, why does it matter that the clients are under an Apache License? I thought if you use the AGPL you have to contribute back the client code as well, when you use the server remotely.
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